Four Freedoms

first.”

“Actually,” he said, “that might be a tall order. The cafeteria’s the

only eats for a long way.”

“Then that’ll do,” said Martha.

“For a drink,” he said, “there’s the Bomb Bay.”

“The what?”

He explained, she thanked him, gave him a wave, and caught up

with the other women. Meanwhile Horse had gone back for the car

and now drew up beside him.

“What did you learn?” he asked.

Prosper didn’t answer, and climbed into the car, thinking that some

word, some name, had occurred in those minutes that meant a lot, but

in a way he couldn’t grasp, and he kept thinking about it as Horse,

talking a mile a minute, drove him back and dropped him at the

office.

“Get those films developed,” he said, as he drove away.

“Yessir.”

On Prosper’s desk lay an envelope containing the new Upp ’n’ Adam

cartoons for him to letter. He sat down and slid them out, Bristol board

eleven-by-fourteen inches, on which the artist had sketched his picture

of the two fools—fat Upp blithely driving his forklift to disaster as

Adam points at him and calls out to the viewer. The line that Prosper

was to add was “Adam sez: If you see something, SAY something!!!”

Prosper didn’t think the picture was very expressive of what he took

that phrase to mean, that the bosses wanted you to watch out for pil-

fering, waste, slacking, even sabotage: it was about getting workers to

watch one another and report to management. Well it was hard to pic-

ture that using the two friends, with Adam turning Upp in. The blue

lines of the initial sketch were overlaid in black ink, improving it here

and there; those blue lines, the first thoughts, would magically disap-

pear when the whole was photographed.

If you see something, say something.

Prosper remembered what it was that Martha the pilot had said that

had tinkled a bell in his brain. San Francisco: she’d said San Francisco.

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

He got up, hoisting himself so fast he nearly tumbled over. If you

see something say something. He made it out the door and down

through the plant, people calling hellos after him, and toward the caf-

eteria. If she hadn’t gone there, then the dorm, or the Bomb Bay. He

was already speaking to her, making a case. Sure it’s against the regu-

lations but hell what isn’t, listen her husband’s an airman, an airman,

a fighter pilot. And who’m I, I’m, well, I heard the story and gosh she

seems like such a swell kid, so young, I’ll tell you something, she was

married one day and he was off to the Pacific, she hasn’t seen him

since. Her husband. Shot down in the Pacific, a hero. It’s important,

really. And Martha, you’re the pilot, aren’t you, and what you say goes

in that plane, isn’t that right?

The faster he spoke to Martha the faster he walked, hardly feeling

the effort, the din of his blood in his ears. Probably, probably, it’d be

harder to convince Diane of this than Martha, you could tell Martha

was fearless and made up her own mind, but Diane? It’d work, it would,

she’d just have to see, he’d make her do it. He invoked Mary Wilma,

prayed to Mary Wilma for power, he’d be Mary Wilma and make

Diane do his plan, by his will and by his certainty, he’d.

He stopped still, not only because his arms had at last got in touch

with his brain and said No more, and his breath was gone: also because

he had another thought. The thought was to not do this at all, no, to

forget about it and not tell Diane and forget he ever thought of it.

Because that might be better for him.

In the Bomb Bay she’d said to him I don’t even remember what he

looks like.

But he was here, Prosper, before her. She didn’t need to try to

remember him. Those good-bye marriages didn’t need to last, every-

body said they didn’t last. She said this was the worst thing that’d ever

happened to her, but what if it was for the best, what if she forgot

Danny more and more until he was gone altogether, and he himself

was still here, not going anywhere.

And alive. At the war’s end he’d certainly be still alive.

At that shameful thought he started again toward the cafeteria. No.

No. She was beautiful and she’d known how to be kind to him without

diminishing him or treating him like an infant, she was just good at

that and so he knew she was good inside, and inside her too was his

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 339

own baby. But he had no right. Just because of that he had no right. No

fair even making her the offer, posing a choice, it could only hurt her to

hear it: the war was winding down and he’d soon be out of a job,

maybe for life, and what kind of a prize did that make him? She couldn’t

say yes. He’d have to advise her not to. If he was her.

His heart hurt. Actually, even though the heart beat hard, it was the

muscles of his chest that hurt, and the bronchia and throat through

which the burning breath rushed; but he’d have said it was his heart.

He reached the cafeteria, the vast spread of tables and people, not so

crowded though at this hour, and after a minute they were easy to

spot, the four of them at their table, it was as though the eyes of the

other diners there, turning toward them, pointed them out to him.

Well so what, he thought. What he had, or would have, was a son,

maybe a daughter, growing up somewhere, at one end of the nation or

the other, and nobody’d know he was the father, nobody but Diane

and he, and even she might talk herself into forgetting one day, though

he hoped not, it wouldn’t be fair.

Danny’d never know, but he knew. He knew what men don’t know,

what they don’t get to know. They think they know but they don’t

know, because they aren’t told, because they don’t ask. But he knew,

more than all of them, and better than that, he knew that he knew.

And that was enough, would be enough, for now.

“Hi, Martha,” he said, a little breathless. She’d watched him make

his way across the floor with a kind of forbearance, not unkind, smil-

ing even. She lifted her face in inquiry. “So. Can I ask you a ques-

tion?”

She nodded and pointed to the chair opposite her, and he felt her

eyes on him as he maneuvered to sit, unlock his braces, and turn to her,

now an ordinary man. Then somehow his nerve went and he didn’t

know how to begin. “So,” he said again. She pulled out a cork-tipped

cigarette and he hastened to find his lighter and light it for her.

“So when’d you first fly?” he asked at last.

5

Summer 1936. Swimming was over for the afternoon and the girls

were sitting on the dock or out on the slimy wooden float, looking

down into the gray-green water or over toward the prickle of pines

across the lake or at each other. Their wool suits of black, or navy

edged with white, drying in the late sun: still damp tomorrow when the

girls would have to squirm back into them for morning swim.

It came as a noise first, from where they couldn’t tell because the

bowl of the lake bounced sound from rim to rim unplaceably: new girls

were known to wake up crying out in the night when the Delaware &

Hudson night train passed miles away—it sounded like it was going to

go right through the cabin.

Martha was the first to see it, turning and tilting as it rose over the

pines in a way that seemed uncertain to her then but wouldn’t later

when she knew what the pilot was about. High up it caught the full

sun, and white as it was it almost disappeared now and then against

the sky, then came clear and solidified as it swooped down around the

south end of the lake to approach the lake longwise.

“It’s a seaplane,” someone said, and now you could see that it was;

instead of wheels it seemed to be shod in big soft slippers. Martha

watched in awe as it came down fearlessly onto the lake’s surface,

seeming as light as a falling leaf and yet huge with power, the sound

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 341

enormous now, the propeller nearly invisible in its speed. Then it struck

the water—they gasped or cried out, but not Martha, as it seemed to

bounce off and settle again, this time opening a long white rip in the

gray fabric of the lake surface. Martha’d never seen anything so taking

in all her life. She’d seen airplanes in the movies, where (like acrobats

in the circus) they seemed merely impossible; even though you knew

they were real they didn’t seem it. But this one landing with negligent

skill on the water—throttling its engine now and lifting softly in relax-

ation, turning toward the dock of the boys’ camp on the other shore—

it was real, what it had done was real and the pilot could have made a

mistake and come to grief and hadn’t; she could hear it, the power it

expended, she could even smell it.

The girls stood and watched it even after it had tied up at the boys’

dock and sat high and still and innocent there like any old skiff. Of

course everything that occurred in or around the boys’ camp was of

interest. A long time afterward Martha would think how intense it had

been, the two camps so near but with a great gulf fixed between, like

life as it was lived then—the signals and displays from one side meant

for the other side to see and decode, the thousand plans laid every

summer but never acted on to cross the gap. It amazed her to look back

and think how many camps there were in the great north woods like

hers, boys divided from girls not far away. At Martha’s camp the two

had occupied spits or points that had seemed to strain toward each

other, like Romeo and Juliet, like two bodies in movie seats; getting

closer too over the years (so it seemed to Martha as she came back

summer after summer and her legs grew longer). As though all of their

cool nights and hot days and their talk and the summer’s flickering

endless contests about who had said a cruel thing behind whose back

and who was snooty and who was whiny and who was definitely a

part-time Liz were all caused, like a reflection, by what happened

across the lake where the boys fought and played mumblety-peg and

ganged up to humiliate the weak and snapped one another’s bottoms

with towels. Martha knew they did all these things because her older

brother before his illness had gone to the same camp at the lake of the

woods.

They could see the swarm of boys around the plane then. A tall

counselor made his way amid them to where the pilot was just then

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

climbing out—he seemed to be wearing a Panama hat, of all things—

and the two of them met and shook hands, and the boys gathered

around the two and the girls could see nothing more. After a brief time

the pilot got up on the plane again, importuned obviously by the boys

asking questions and admiring the craft, and with a wave like Lind-

bergh, he shut himself in; then after a solemn silent moment the engine

started and the propeller kicked once, seemed to travel backward,

kicked again as the engine nacelle blew white smoke, then sped to a blur

in that way a propeller has, hysterical and self-satisfied at once.

What had happened—they learned at supper—was that a boy in the

camp, a first-year, had got bit by a copperhead, and they had no serum,

and so they’d radio’d out, and the plane had brought it in. Just like a

movie—snake, serum, radio, plane. It was thrilling but not as moving

to Martha as the plane itself, as it turned toward them—not toward

them, of course, toward the length of the lake, to take off again. But at

that, somehow all at once and without thought, the girls started waving

and calling and jumping up and down; and the plane seemed to pause

a moment, and then glided with an air of curious interest toward their

dock while the girls cheered in triumph.

It was a Stinson V-77 Gullwing, though that too she’d only learn

later, when she flew one. This summer afternoon she only stood trans-

fixed, but at the front of the pack, as Pete Bigelow (that would turn out

to be his name) stilled his engines to a mutter, and pushed his door

open, and asked if anybody wanted to go for a ride. None of the others

would—not in their bathing costumes, maybe not ever—but Martha

grabbed a robe and her espadrilles and presented herself before she

even knew she had.

“Two dollars,” said Pete, tilting back the Panama. He was older

and uglier than she thought he’d be. Two dollars was a lot of money:

all that was in Martha’s account at the camp store.

“Pay when we get back?” she said, and—seeing her there with no

money, no pockets to put it in—Pete Bigelow laughed, and reached out

a sun-red arm to pull her up and in, just as Martha glimpsed hurrying

toward the dock from wherever she’d been malingering with a cigarette

and a Photoplay the contemptible, the incompetent swimming instruc-

tor, her face a shocked mask of disbelief. Pete reached across her and

pulled shut the flimsy door. He kicked up the engine, a heart-seizing

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 343

noise, a noise that was not only loud but also large, as though it pro-

duced the whole scale of possible sounds from the lowest to the highest

and erased every other sound there could be. From then on it was the

strongest, most easeful sound Martha Goldensohn knew.

It wasn’t until she was in college that she began taking flying lessons.

That would have been early 1941, and already the Air Corps was being

withdrawn from the routine jobs and organized into a fighting force,

and there was a need for fliers and planes who could take urgent mes-

sages or deliver those serums or search for lost hikers. She’d go down

in her little Austin runabout to the flying field whenever she could, and

pay for lessons at twelve dollars an hour, outrageous, nothing else at

school cost anything like that.

“Amelia Earhart, huh,” the instructor, whose name was Doc of

course, remarked when she signed up.

“Ha ha,” she said. “Anytime a woman says, I’d like to fly, you have

to say ‘Amelia Earhart’ right after, or you have bad luck all day—that

it?”

She did well, she had a gift, though she almost flunked out of col-

lege, which Daddy would not have been happy about, spending all her

time on the field or in the air. She managed mostly Cs that semester;

what mattered to her was that she got her pilot’s license. She took a

little inheritance she got that year to go in with a couple of men around

the field on a six-year-old Cessna Airmaster that had been rebuilt after

a tipover on landing. She convinced her partners to sign up with her for

the brand-new Civil Air Patrol. Ten days later the Japanese bombed

Pearl Harbor.

Martha had felt since her first flight that if you’d once flown a plane

you’d never go to war, never want to, never see the point. Not only

because all those borders and their checkpoints and barricades would

be invisible or imaginary looked down on from above but also because

flight itself was better than fighting. She knew well enough that war

delighted men who could fly. She knew about the fleets of bombers over

London, so merciless; the Stukas that strafed the retreating British at

Dunkirk, the planes that shot up the lifeboats of sinking enemy ships:

you could think by 1942 that flying itself arose from an evil impulse

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

and ought to be banned. But she loved it, and her love, like any love,

seemed to her innocent. She couldn’t argue it and wasn’t going to try.

The great thing about the CAP was that you got all the fuel you

could use, though sometimes the supply itself was low. After all she

and her fellow CAP pilots were helping to protect the nation. She never

herself got to go out on coastal patrol and hunt for German subs (or

sink one, as one heroic or lucky CAP pilot had done), but still she was

showing what women could do in the war effort, and also, by the way,

what Jewish people (as her mother always named them) could do, take

that, Hitler, and all of them.

Silly, and she didn’t need an excuse, but she took the ones she was

offered. She flew packages and medical goods and government docu-

ments and ferried officials and searched for lost hikers all that summer,

and then in the fall, she got a telegram: it was one sent to every quali-

fied woman pilot that could be identified, and it invited her to become

a pilot with the Women’s Air Ferry Service.

Yes she’d go. She could go back and finish college when this was

over. If she washed out, well, she’d go back to the CAP program, or go

rivet things or weld things. She wasn’t going to go read Shakespeare

and Milton now, no, Daddy, not now. She convinced him and he con-

vinced Mother, or Mother at least in the end didn’t say no.

The week before she was to take the train south (she’d wanted to

drive the Austin down but Daddy nixed that and got her a roomette)

she stayed home every night and had dinner with her parents and her

brother and her grandmother, helped her mother paste photographs in

a family album and label the black pages with white ink, such beauti-

ful handwriting she had, and she had lunch in the city with her father

and drank a Manhattan and let him take her shopping to buy simple

strong outfits they imagined would be suitable for her training (she’d

send them home when eventually uniforms were issued them—she

lived in those and her rumpled fatigues and a couple of skirts and

blouses).

Her last evening before heading south she spent with her brother

Norman, playing cribbage and joshing and drinking a cocktail Norman

had invented that was so nasty you couldn’t have more than one, it was

more a joke than an intoxicant. Norman rolled up to the little bar in

the library and pretended to know exactly what he was doing.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 345

“Creme de menthe,” he said, flourishing the Mae West–shaped

bottle. “White of egg. Muddle the lemon with sugar.”

“Oh stop, Norman.”

“You’ll love it.”

He turned the chair to face her, with the huge murky drink in hand.

“To you,” he said. She took it from him and picked up his too; he

needed both hands to move the chair through the room and down the

little ramp that led to what Daddy called the card room. He locked the

brake and with her help went from the wheelchair to an easy chair he

liked, in which he usually spent much of his day.

“I like the mustache,” she said. “It’s so handsome.”

Norman was an inordinately good-looking man, Martha thought,

and everyone else did too, and a vestigial vanity about it had continued

even after the polio, when (Norman said) good looks were about as

much use to him as another ear. His thick black hair fell over his brow

like Gable’s, and the new mustache was like his too.

“You’ll write,” he said.

“Of course.”

“Long letters. Every day.”

“I might be a little busy.”

She didn’t mind the job of writing her life for Norman. Even when

there wasn’t much life. In fact it was easier when there wasn’t much to

say. Setting out on an adventure, in aid of the nation, to fly planes in

the company of other women with nerve and skill: that was going to be

harder, she could see that already, but she’d do it, she’d brag, she’d tell

all, and not a touch of sorrow for him, not a touch of it. That was the

agreement, never spoken. She could feel condemned down deep inside

her that she could fly when he couldn’t walk, she could feel that it was

wrong in her to feel joy in any movement or possibility whatever when

she sat with him here: but she knew also never, ever to show it.

“So any news?” she asked.

“No news, Martha.” He smiled the smile that always came with

that answer, and sipped his concoction. “Oh. This.”

He put down his drink and made his way back into the wheelchair

and across the rug to a table by the window flanked with shelves and

drawers where his coin collection was housed. There were more albums

in his rooms upstairs, but the trip upward in the clanking lift was one

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

he took as infrequently as he could. He’d told Martha that making all

that noise was as embarrassing as loudly passing wind in public.

“Here,” he said. He took, from a stiff envelope addressed to him

and sent from Mexico City, a small envelope of glassine. From that he

removed and dropped into her hand a heavy coin of gray silver.

“Just arrived,” Norman said. He often showed her his new acquisi-

tions—reading history and novels and this collection were what he

did—but this coin seemed to evoke not the usual enthusiasm but a kind

of melancholy in him. He let her finger it for a moment and then took

it back, to tell her (as he always did) its story.

“A Spanish milled dollar,” he said, “1733, see? Reign of Philip the

Fifth. That’s the arms of Spain. This is a nice piece, and maybe was

never circulated. Look on the obverse.”

The other side of the coin said Vtraque Vnum and showed a pair

of pillars with a scroll between them. Martha tried to remember her

Latin. “And both one?”

Norman nodded, not bad. “Actually ‘the one and the other.’ Mean-

ing the two worlds, East and West, Spain and the New World. But look

closer at the pillars. Here.” He picked up a Sherlock Holmes–style

magnifying glass from the table and gave it to her. “Look at the little

scroll. Can you read that?”

“No.”

“It says Plus ultra, ” Norman said. He lifted his head, tossed back

that falling lock of shining hair. “It means Even farther. Even farther,

Sis.” He put the cold coin back into her hand and closed her fingers

over it. “Keep it with you,” he said. “Go even farther. Just write.”

She wrote: she didn’t write that her first training base had no fire equip-

ment, that they’d had no insurance, no hospital anywhere nearby, and

they’d gone up in whatever planes were available and not always

brought them down in one piece, partly because the mechanics dis-

liked the idea of women flying their planes and pushed the checkout

jobs onto the least senior men. She didn’t say that, because he’d tell

Mother and Mother didn’t need to be more alarmed than she already

was or more certain that Martha should come back home and go work

with the USO. She wrote him funny stories and amazing stories and

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 347

stories that were both, about being sent down to the Great Dismal

Swamp, yes that’s its name, to learn how to pull targets for antiaircraft

gunners to train on, gunners who missed and hit the tow planes every

now and then. She told him about the male pilot who was assigned to

fly with a woman pilot and stormed in to his commander and said he

was quitting if he had to fly with women, and tore off his wings and

threw them down on the commander’s desk; the commander said I’ll

tell you when you’re quitting, pick up those wings and report for duty.

So maybe that story wasn’t true, anyway Martha didn’t know it was

true and the one or two male commanding officers she’d had anything

to do with were as patronizing and horrid as any pilot, but it was the

right story anyway. She told Norman how you used “Code X” on your

orders to mean you couldn’t fly because you had your monthlies, or “a

limited physical disability” as they said. She quoted him the silly songs

they sang: The moral of this story, girls, as you can plainly see, Is

never trust a pilot an inch above your knee— but she didn’t tell him

when she lost her virginity.

She told him about flying: how at first she felt like she’d never

learned to fly at all, the planes she was training in landed at nearly a

hundred miles an hour, which was faster than any cruising speed she’d

ever maintained. In a dive you could black out and blood would pour

out of your nose. Her old Cessna had put out about 70 horsepower,

and these things had two fierce engines that could get up to 1500 horse-

power, there’s the difference right there; they had retractable landing

gear to remember to retract, constant-speed propellers, a hundred

things to remember that she’d never encountered before.

She didn’t tell him about the women she’d heard of who’d lost con-

trol of a plane, or whose plane had failed them, who’d died in a crash.

Boredom and inaction were almost as large a part of it as danger,

though: sitting around the duty room gossiping and “hangar flying” as

they said, telling stories of this or that flight or near miss or cool bravery;

riding the milk train or, worse, the bus back from ferrying a plane; doing

paperwork; waiting; more waiting. Angling for the better jobs, for more

flying, fewer ground lessons, watching other women get ahead. There

was no way not to see that the WAFS, which became the WASP, was in

some ways a lot like college, like sorority, like school, like, yes, camp.

There was always a core group who never got in trouble for things that

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

others had to pay for, whose records stayed spotless when others were

washed out for minor infractions. They were the ones who shared a way

of talking, a line of jokes, a kind of insouciance, the ones that male com-

manders thought of as their sort of woman. Many of them had got their

licenses and their hours because they’d been able to fly their own planes,

had families that could afford them, and been able to spend summers

racing or barnstorming. She’d known such girls all her life, she was one

of them herself at the same time as she could never be one of them, she

didn’t give a damn about that, but she didn’t like getting sidelined or

blackballed either, for the one reason no one would say: and fortunately,

in this world and this time, what mattered most was how good you were,

farm girl, working girl, college girl, Jewish girl. She was good. She loved

the flying, loved learning she could fly huge bombers with as much ease

and certainty as she’d flown her old Cessna. And she came to love her

sisters. In spite of it all. Most of them.

“So now can I ask you a question?” Martha said to Prosper in the Dining

Commons in Henryville. Her comrades had departed for bed or the

Bomb Bay, and he’d told her his story and made his pitch, and she’d not

said yes or no, though No was obviously the right answer.

“Sure,” Prosper said. “Certainly.”

“Is that polio you have?”

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

“Oh.” She looked around them, not as though she was about to tell

a secret, and yet for a reason, he thought. “My older brother,” she said,

“has polio.”

“Oh? Right now?”

“Well I mean he had it once. He’s. Well he has a wheelchair.”

“Oh.”

“He’s at home.”

“Uh-huh.”

He waited, ready to answer from his store of information and expe-

rience any question she might like to put to him; not many people

needed it.

“So where’ll you go when this is over?” Martha asked at length,

seeming to change the subject. “Home?”

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 349

“Oh I don’t know.” He opened his arms. “Maybe see the world.”

She took that for a joke, or at least a whimsy, and in fact he some-

what drooped just after saying it. “You liked working here?” she said.

“It’s been pretty wonderful. Actually.”

“Because you got to do your part.”

“Because there’s no stairs.”

Martha studied him in puzzlement for a moment, then laughed.

“All right. I understand.”

“Is your brother working?”

“Him? Oh no. No, he had planned to go to law school, but then.”

Prosper nodded, nodded again, acknowledging. “Lots of stairs at

law school,” he said, “I’d imagine.”

Martha laughed again, a better outcome than he’d hoped for.

“Maybe if there weren’t,” he said, “I’d go be a lawyer.”

“Okay,” she said. “All right.”

He drew out his cigarettes, and shook one forth for her to take if

she liked, but she waved it away. “So Martha,” he said. “About this

request. This, this appeal. What do you think?”

“Well why do you want to do this for her? I don’t get it.”

“She’s. I mean she’s just.”

“I’m sorry,” Martha said, “but I get the feeling there’s something

about this you aren’t telling me.”

“It’s just important,” Prosper said helplessly.

“You tell me why it is,” Martha said. “Why it’s important to you,

and why you’re here asking and she’s not, and maybe I’ll give you an

answer.”

He told her the story, Diane’s, and told her his part in it too. It took

a while. She listened. At the end she was leaning forward on her crossed

arms, all ears.

“Well. Gee. I wouldn’t have thought.”

“Why? You mean a guy like me?”

She shrugged, smiling. “It’s natural to think.”

“Is it?”

“You’re blushing,” she said.

“Wouldn’t you say, though,” Prosper said, moving the ashtray

around as though it were a fixed opinion he wanted to loosen, “that

people are all the time thinking that only certain kinds of people can

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

do certain kinds of things? And you can’t change their opinion even if

you know better? Even if, for you, doing that thing, that thing you do,

doesn’t seem so unlikely to you, if it seems to you the most natural

thing in the world?”

She was blushing now herself.

“I just mean,” he said. And he gestured to her. “You flying. The big

bombers. Tell me the men all thought you could do it, oh no problem

there. Tell me the other girls thought so. Tell me your mom thought

so.”

For a long time she looked at him, as though she was putting

together from all over her life the parts of a thought she’d never thought

before. Then she said: “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay I’ll take her.”

“Now you won’t tell her I told you all that.”

“No. Get her there at 0445 hours. That’s quarter to five, a.m. No

later or I’ll leave without her. One little bag, no more. She should dress

warm. Tell her if she pukes on me I’ll push her out the door.”

“I’ll tell her that.”

“Don’t you dare.”

They shook hands but then still sat for a while. Martha said she’d

probably be back this way soon, with another crew. Maybe they could

talk some more, she said, and Prosper Olander said oh sure, he’d defi-

nitely be here, he hoped they could meet, yes, he’d like that very much,

to meet and talk: he would.

6

You remember my friend Poindexter,” Danny said. “Bill.”

“Of course I remember him. I’m not going to forget that.”

They lay naked in the center of a bed big enough for three,

faint light of a single lamp in a far corner, the room was as vast

as a palace. Top o’ the Mark. This was the room that Danny had been

given, a suite actually, his buddies coming and going all day but all

gone now, leaving it to Danny and Diane. She’d not told him how she’d

got there, she’d put it a day back, a long train ride, not so bad though

she said, not bad at all, because it brought her here to him. Actually she

felt like she’d been carried here on a witch’s broomstick, it was the

most dreadful and terrifying thing she’d ever done, ever even imagined

doing, which she actually couldn’t have in advance. And that woman

Martha just grinning at her and making small talk and pointing out

the pretty lights below whenever Diane beside her could open her

eyes.

“He got hurt pretty bad,” Danny said. In this dimness his face was

hollowed and skull-like, the sockets of his eyes deep and his cheeks

sunken, as though he’d seen things that wouldn’t pass from him, as

though he went on seeing them always. “We had to land on the deck in

the dark. We’d just made it back from hunting the Jap carrier and it

was night. Lot of guys didn’t get back. Almost out of gas, you had to

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

set it down first try, couldn’t go around again and again. They’d lit up

the ship with every light they had, but it was still like landing on a

nighttime parking lot in the middle of a city. That’s when I got banged

up. Danny almost made it, but his tailhook missed the cable and he

went into the crash barrier and over the side. His plane broke up when

it went into the water. They got him out, but he’d crushed his left side.

He’ll live, but he’s lost an arm and a leg.”

“Oh Danny.” He’d said it all as though he were writing it in a letter,

or reading it from one: as though it were far away from himself, some-

thing heard of or remembered from long ago.

“Yeah well. He’s up and around, sort of. Sylvia’s leaving him,

though.”

“No.”

“Well.” He moved his dark body in the silky sheets. He’d lost

weight; his white north-land face was as dark as hers. “You can under-

stand, I guess. I mean he was—well he’s half a man. How was he gonna

keep her.”

“Oh Danny.”

“I don’t think I could do it,” Danny said. “He was damn damn

brave. Said he just wanted to live. I don’t think I could do that, live

with that.”

“Oh Danny no.” She covered her mouth, and her breasts.

“Don’t think about it,” Danny said and moved to hold her again.

She’d been afraid up to the last minute that he might be so war weary

or war torn or hurt that he wouldn’t be able to or want to, and then

where’d she be? But it was the reverse, he wouldn’t stop, clung to her

and pressed himself to her as though he could just disappear right

inside her and forget everything. She’d asked Prosper—asked him once

and then again, last thing before she’d climbed aboard that horrid

plane—if there was a chance that the baby she carried could turn out,

well, like him, Prosper. Whether the baby might have, you know, that.

No no, Prosper’d told her, no, no chance, that was an operation he’d

had that went wrong, not something in the blood you could inherit.

The same answer twice. But just now she thought of what she hadn’t

asked: what had that operation been for? What was it supposed to fix,

that it didn’t fix?

“Oh Danny,” she said, and said again, weeping even as she held

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 353

him, all she could say to mean so many things she couldn’t or didn’t

know how to say, the name of every grief endured or escaped, every

misunderstood grace, every utter loss, every hope, every new fear, each

one remembered as they embraced, felt as though for the first or the

last time.

Prosper got a letter from her a week later. She told him she guessed

the plan had worked. She’d decided to stay out there, she said, go home

again to her parents, just rest and take it easy and eat good food and be

careful for the baby until it was born. She’d write to her roommate, she

said, and get her clothes and things sent home, there wasn’t much

really, the way they all lived out there; the dungarees and gloves and

things could just be thrown out. She’d begun then to write something

more and crossed it out so hard he couldn’t even guess at the meaning,

or why she’d crossed it out: something she thought would hurt him to

read, or something she’d decided he shouldn’t know; something she

didn’t want to promise, or offer; something.

In the Bomb Bay a new band was playing, an all-girl one this time,

the Honeydrops. Their weary bus was outside, and their ruffled gowns

looked weary too, but they themselves weren’t, few as they were they

beat up a big sound; their singer wailing high above the horns and

clarinets, looking right at Prosper, as though the song she sang asked

him and him alone a question: maybe the other men there felt the same

but he was the only one who just sat and listened. Prosper was hearing

one of the songs she sang for the first time. She sang it holding the

microphone stand with tenderness and putting her lips almost to the

bulbous mike itself to croon, he’d never seen that before. She’d kiss him

once, she sang; she’d kiss him twice, and once again; it’d been a long,

long time.

In the coming year, when Bing sang this song, and the boys were

returning from Europe and then from the Pacific, it would be about

how hard it had been for them over there, about coming home at last to

wives and girlfriends. We’d hear it constantly; we can still hear it. But

when Prosper heard it sung there in the Bomb Bay well before it was a

hit, and with Diane’s letter in his pocket, it seemed to be not about men

but women. It seemed to be what those women, those hundreds of

thousands left behind here, might say to someone they might meet,

someone like himself: that they had waited a long long time, and were

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

going to get a kiss and more than a kiss now where and when they

could, until that man did come home, and everything would be differ-

ent: but this was now and not then. Which in a way seemed to him

dreadfully and wholly sad, even though he supposed he had been a

beneficiary of that situation, and perhaps even had done some women

some good that they wouldn’t have got otherwise, which was somehow

sad too. In fact he couldn’t decide which was sadder, and tried not to

ponder it too much. He guessed that there would be time for that soon

enough.

He ordered a Cuba libre. Soon the band stopped playing and the

singer softly and sincerely said good night.

Late December 1944 and there are fifty B-30s on the tarmac at Ponca

City, unable to be flown out until whatever’s wrong with their engine

cowlings or their oil tanks or ignition processes is discovered and fixed.

We couldn’t stop making them, for what would be done with us and all

our skills and training, all our tools and procedures, then? So—a little

more slowly, a little more thoroughly—we went on making them, the

Teenie Weenies doing more standing around than before (as the Teenie

Weenies in the comic pages are all doing most of the time while the

active ones explore or labor). And then one more is drawn out the great

doors to join the flock of others pointed toward the West and the enemy

but going nowhere. When the doors open the icy fog rolls in and rises

to the height of the ceiling above, to linger there like a lost black

cloud.

How cold and dark that winter of ’44–’45 was. In the North it was

the bitterest in years; the lack of fuel oil was life threatening in some

places, places far from Ponca City, we heard it on the radio, eyewit-

ness. It seemed harder because for a while it looked like the war in

Europe at least was almost over. War production was cut back and

some items unseen since before the war began to return to the stores—

irons, pots and pans, stoves, refrigerators. Then came the huge

Ardennes counteroffensive and the Battle of the Bulge and the mad

resistance in the Pacific at every atoll and beach, and the planners

thought again. Some controls on metals and other things were reim-

posed; new ration books were issued, and not only that: all your

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 355

unspent ration points from ’44 were invalidated. Everybody started

1945 with a new damn book, same old rules to follow, now maybe

forever: that winter suspicion that the sun’s not ever going to return.

Except now people didn’t feel so ready to sacrifice, we were tired of all

that, so tired, and so back came Mr. Black in a big way, the stuff you

wanted was there if you could find it, gas traded for whatever you had,

farm-butchered beef and pork removed from the system and sold out of

meat lockers that you knew about if you knew.

Those who are going into the services now, boys out of high school,

the rejects of the factories, the once but no longer deferred, know they

will be the last: the boys mostly eager for the chance, desperate to grow

old enough in time, others perhaps feeling differently. Now the lives of

men killed and wounded far away seem to have been wasted, a loss

insupportable, and more are dying now than in the frenzy of begin-

ning—in the climb up useless Italy, in the frozen mud of the Ardennes,

in the assaults on palm tree islands in nowhere, for nothing. It’s begin-

ning to be possible to think so, though you’d never say it. For the first

time, photographs of the prostrate bodies of our men are shown to us,

on beaches, in the snow: the dead in Life. Why now? Is it a warning, a

judgment, a caution—you see this now but you will see far worse if you

slacken? We don’t know.

At Van Damme Aero Ponca City a woman walks down the long

nave of the Assembly Building with a steady tread, eyes looking neither

left nor right. It’s Mona the mail girl, with a telegram. The edge of the

yellow form can be seen in the front pouch of her bag. A mail girl’s

never seen on the floor if she’s not bringing one, she never brings just

mail, you get that at home or at the post office, they bring mail to the

offices of the managers and bosses but not to Associates out on the

floor. Of all the mail girls in their night blue uniforms it’s Mona who is

always chosen to deliver the telegram: tall and phlegmatic, vast black

pelt of hair over her brow and shoulders, black brows knitted together

in the middle over the prow of her nose—those who watch her pass

know these details, there have been opportunities to study her. When

she comes through the floor, her long slow steps, a zone of silence

moves with her, leaving a stillness in its wake even if those behind take

up their work again, spared this time; and the silence moves on ahead,

and spreads around her when she stops.

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

“Mrs. Bunce Wrobleski?” Mona asks, drawing out the telegram.

They know; they stop working but they don’t—most don’t, out of pity

or to honor her privacy—look at Connie taking the flimsy form from

Mona; Mona because she can do this task without weeping herself,

can stand dark and silent there long enough for respect but not too

long.

MRS BUNCE WROBLESKI

VAN DAMME AERO PONCA CITY OKLA=

THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP

REGRET THAT YOUR HUSBAND CPL BUNCE J WROBLESKI WAS

KILLED IN ACTION 05 JAN 1945 LETTER FOLLOWS=

JA WILLIAM THE ADJUTANT GENERAL

Once General Marshall wrote these letters in his own hand. Now

there are too many, too many even to count yet. Nor can the silence of

that moment last a long time. The women around Connie (the men

won’t come forward or can’t or don’t know how) shelter her, and help

her to her feet from where she has sat helplessly down; and they hold

her one by one and help her off the floor even when she says No, no, let

me go, let me just go on, there’s so much, so much to do.

After a time we do start up again, and the silence disperses.

7

Connie went back north with Andy to bring him to see his grand-

parents, to leave him there for a while so they could have him

with them; after a while she could come back, go on working.

She’d got a letter telling her how to collect on Bunce’s standard

government insurance policy, he must have told her he had one but she

didn’t remember him doing so and she’d stared down at the letter and

the huge amount of money feeling sick and horrified, as at some loath-

some joke. She’d already been informed that Bunce wouldn’t be brought

home, not now, that there were just too many to bring home; he’d be

buried with the thousands there in the land he’d died in, it hurt her

heart to think of it, and to think what Buster and his mom must feel.

She had to go back, for them. So she wrapped her son in the warm

winter clothes he’d worn when they left the North, and they boarded

the train, the same train.

“Good-bye, Prosper.”

“Good-bye, Connie.”

“I’ll see you again soon.”

“Sure. I’ll be seeing you.”

“Are you all right? What is it?”

“Yes sure. Just my back.”

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

“Your back hurts?”

“My back hurts some all the time, Connie. Almost all the time.”

“You never said.”

“No reason to say. Get on board, Connie.”

“God bless you, Prosper.”

Going through the prairie and the river valleys Connie seemed to

see all that she couldn’t see when she had come the other way: the

shabby towns and the weary old cars, the streets without people,

unpainted storefronts, peeling billboards advertising things that no

one could get or weren’t for sale. All the hurt done to this country in

the last ten years and more, the things not repaired or replaced, still

left undone because the war came first. The light-less factories too,

fences rusting, gates closed with chains. Rollo had told her that thou-

sands of businesses had failed since the war buildup began, little shops

and bigger places too that couldn’t compete with the great names for

the government contracts. Consolidation. More had failed than in the

Depression.

Gold star in a window there.

Maybe she could see it all because of where she had been for months,

that place all new and furiously busy. One of those that would come

out rich.

Night and the train filling at small stations with soldiers, different

somehow now from the crowds of them that had played cards and

teased her on the way down. Different in her eyes. Outside, the land so

dark, new regulations, all places of amusement had to close at mid-

night: no neon lights or floodlights to save power and fuel.

Dark, rich. She tried to remember what god it was in ancient times

who ruled over the land below the earth, which was always dark but

rich, because he was also the god of money, of gold dug in the dark

earth. Pluto. Plutocracy, a vocabulary word. Did she travel home

through Pluto’s realm, money given and made, the great owners get-

ting richer nightlong and every one else getting a little richer too,

hoarding their money like misers and waiting? And the dead souls

without rest among us, so many. Around her the standing men in

their drab uniforms swayed with the train’s motion like wheat, so

quiet in the dark. Some of them, she hoped, some at least were going

home.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 359

That spring we watched in the newsreels the gleaming B-29 Superfor-

tresses, long and slim and impossibly wide-winged like the Pax but

coming smartly off the assembly lines of four different factories in

working order and already winging over the Pacific. They could reach

Tokyo now, as the B-30 was intended to do from bases in China; but

those bases had never materialized, and the B-29s took off from the

little islands of the Pacific, Saipan, Tinian. In March they were sent in

a great fleet in the night to fly in low and drop not great blockbuster

bombs but hundreds of thousands of little canisters of jellied gasoline.

Tokyo they always said was a Paper City. Before the war, girls collected

Japanese dolls with paper fans and paper umbrellas and paper chrysan-

themums for their hair; the dolls were accompanied by little books

about Japan and the paper houses and cities. In the newsreels we’d seen

the jellied gasoline tested, an instant spread of white fire and black

smoke, each canister making a disaster. The crowded city burned so

hotly that the Superfortresses were tossed high up into the air above it

by the rising heat, like ash above a bonfire. Later in the newsreels

Tokyo was a gray checkerboard of streets, nothing more; no buildings,

no people.

In April in Oklahoma, the lilacs purple and white bloomed along

the little river where Prosper and Diane had watched the lights of the

refinery in Pancho’s Zephyr. In the middle of the first shift at the plant

the loudspeaker announcer, whose inadequate and uncertain voice

we’d all come to love and mock, came on unexpectedly.

“Attention attention. In a few moments the president of Van Damme

Aero, Mr. Henry Van Damme, will be speaking to you, bringing you

an important announcement. At this time please shut down machines

and tools in Bulletin A5 sequence. Crane operators please secure lifted

parts.”

Silence, or at least quiet, passed over the buildings, the whine of

machines going down, the ceaseless clangor ceasing.

“Mr. Van Damme will speak to you now.”

There was a moment of silence, a slight rustle of papers, and Henry

Van Damme began to speak, his voice oddly high and light, at least

over this system. Most of us had never heard it before.

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

“Ladies and gentlemen, Van Damme Aero Associates. My office

received a cable two hours ago announcing that President Franklin

Roosevelt died suddenly last night.”

Of course he couldn’t hear us where he was, but he was wise enough

to know he must pause then and wait. There was a noise of dropped

tools, a woman’s piercing cry, and a mist of expelled sound. There was

weeping. A voice here and there raised in blessing or hopeless denial or

distress.

“I knew Franklin Roosevelt,” Henry said, and his light voice grew

lighter. “I know that he would want us not to mourn but to look for-

ward. The work is not done. And yet.” Here came the sound of more

papers shuffled, or perhaps a handkerchief used, and then Henry Van

Damme began speaking again in a different voice, it was hard to say

different in what way, but we lifted our heads.

“Oh captain my captain,” he said. Then for a moment he didn’t go

on. “Oh captain my captain, our fearful trip is done. The ship has

weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won.”

Of course we knew the words, many of us, most of us. It was a verse

we had by heart, one we’d spoken on Oration Day or standing at our

desks while teachers tapped the rhythms. Oh heart heart heart. A few

people spoke softly along with Henry Van Damme, as though it were a

prayer.

“The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and

done;

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

But I, with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.”

The strange thing is that all through that April night there were

rumors across the country of the deaths of other men, names we all

knew, all of them found to be alive the next day. There was a closed

sign on Jack Dempsey’s restaurant in New York City: surely Dempsey

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 361

was dead. Jack Benny had died suddenly. Almost a thousand calls came

into the New York Times asking about the stories. Babe Ruth was

dead. Charlie Chaplin. Frank Sinatra. The rumors fled as fast as long-

distance calls across the country. As though we thought our king and

pharaoh, gone to the other side, needed a phalanx of great ones to con-

duct him on his way.

Henry Van Damme flew back that day to the Coast to talk with his

brother and the relevant officers of Van Damme Aero about reducing

costs on the Pax program as well as larger plans for the postwar world.

As of that moment no industry fulfilling war contracts was permitted

to begin conversion to peacetime production, since that would give an

unfair advantage over others in similar case, but it had to be antici-

pated; they were all like yachts backing and tacking at the start line,

eager to go. This miraculous over-the-rainbow collaboration between

the military and industry was about to end—why would it continue?—

and first across the line would be first into the new world. Competition

though wasn’t what it had been prewar, as we were already learning to

say. It seemed more and more likely that Van Damme Aero itself would

undergo dissolution into one of the even huger consolidated aircraft

firms now in the process of forming like thunderheads out of rising

plumes of heated air. Whether Henry and Julius would come out atop

whatever entity would be born from that, or would remain somehow

within the shell of the older company to fill out their days, was not at

all clear. Henry Van Damme was so tired and sick at heart now that he

began to believe he didn’t care.

“It’s necessary to begin now to reduce the workforce on the pro-

gram, in fact throughout all the programs, including the A-21 and

others that are still fulfilling orders, so that we don’t release a tide of

unemployed just as war work ends and peacetime retooling hasn’t

begun.” That was the VP for labor, whose resemblance to the common

figure of Death and Taxes with scythe and dark cowl had just become

apparent to Henry. “The goal is to retain the skilled workforce. Unions

are helping here; the Management-Labor Policy Committee we’ve had

to set up has done a fine job of getting cooperation on all kinds of labor

issues, the turnovers, the absenteeism, reconversion issues. So far.

Unions will be willing to let go last-hired men, men with poor records,

older men new to the union, and particularly women. Well they only

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

ever admitted as many women as they had to anyway, and those few’ve

got little seniority. Of course the women will largely want to quit as

soon as peace comes, maybe before, not just because they’ll be glad to

get back to the home but because they’ll see that their husbands and all

the other young men being demobilized will need those jobs.”

He turned a leaf of his report—that item dealt with—on to the next.

“The handicaps will want to go home too, where they can be taken

care of. They made a fine effort, many of them, but the limited tasks

they were able to do can be redistributed now. It looks pretty certain

that Social Security will soon be expanded to pay a lifetime disability

payment to those people and they’ll basically retire from the work-

force. They’ll not be our issue.”

He began to describe other matters, colored and other marginal

workers, recovering investments in housing provided at cost or on gov-

ernment loans; Henry Van Damme wasn’t listening closely, though (as

always) he’d find he remembered it all when he needed to know it.

“Henry,” said Julius.

“Jet engines,” said Henry. “One on each wing, underslung. It could

give enough power to get the thing off the ground faster. Less strain on

the other engines, less overheating. It’s possible. Just a further modifi-

cation.”

Julius regarded his brother, the smart daring brother, the one who

always made the wild right guess about what to do next. “The Army

Air Force,” he said, “is thinking of going with Boeing on that, Henry.

Boeing’s got a bomber in plan with about the specs of the Pax but with

all jet engines. Our spies have just informed us. They’ve numbered it

XB-52. The military’s prepared to commit to it. I can give you the

details.”

“Well that’s so wrong,” Henry said, and pressed a hand to his heart.

“That is just so wrong.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Pancho said to Prosper.

Larry the shop steward had that day asked Pancho with a grin about

Pancho’s pink slip, knowing even before Pancho’d opened his pay enve-

lope that he would find one, because (Larry didn’t quite say it but

everyone was free to assume) as shop steward and an associate member

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 363

of the Labor-Management Policy Committee, he’d been personally

responsible for its being put there. It was white, not pink, but it was

what it was. Getting rid of the deadwood, Larry said to his circle of

grinners and nodders. There’s still a war to win here. Prosper had over-

heard.

“What’s that mean?” Prosper now asked. “Doesn’t matter?”

“I have, as the saying goes, other fish to fry,” Pancho replied. He

and Prosper walked the aisles of the Kroger in search of the makings of

a dinner, which took a lot of time when shoppers were as judgmental

as Pancho and as slow-moving as Prosper. “Understand, I came here

chiefly for reasons other than permanent employment. I intended to

refine some ideas I’ve had through observation of a new kind of prac-

tice.” He lifted a potato from a bin and studied its face. “I’ve made

scores of notes.”

“Well I don’t know where you’ll get work now,” Prosper said.

“I should tell you, dear friend, that I’ve long been in communica-

tion with many people around the nation. Around the world in fact.

An inner core of associates as well. My ideas may seem to you to have

come out of my own little coco, but in fact they have been tried and

changed in argument and disputation. Anyway, these associates—I

keep them abreast of my thinking, and they do their best to bring to

fruition those plans I have long laid.”

“Really.” Prosper had seen him carrying his many envelopes to the

branch post office in the plant, licking stamps, asking for special deliv-

ery on this or that. He’d thought it no business of his. He looked into

the green porcelain meat case, checked his book of stamps.

“Now after many false starts it seems that matters are, coinciden-

tally, coming to a head. I’m informed that a man of great wealth has

expressed interest. Real interest. Wants to meet us, talk about these

things.” He leaned close to Prosper as though he might be overheard.

“Oil money.” He took up his search again amid the vegetables. “Of

course not even the greatest magnate, the most repentant profiteer,

could by himself pay for the establishing of even one Harmonious City.

However much the world is in need of its example right now. No. But

now perhaps a real start might be made.”

“I thought this place, Van Damme Aero, was a kind of place you

had in mind.”

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

“An illusion,” Pancho said with calm certitude. “I’m through with

that.”

“So you’re going to meet this man? The oil man?”

Pancho said nothing, as though Prosper was to infer that it must be so.

Prosper had a hard time imagining these associates of Pancho’s. He

thought of the icehouse gang, of the Invisible Agent and his controllers.

He thought that he, Prosper, was perhaps considered one of them in

Pancho’s mind.

They approached the counters, where a dull-faced woman awaited

them at the imposing cash register to add up their purchases. Just there,

crates of oranges stood, the first seen in a good while around here,

things were getting better. While Pancho laid down their selections,

Prosper studied the bright paper labels of the crates, which showed

over and over a hacienda at sunset; primroses and cactus; a huge pot

with zigzag stripe; and, holding in each hand a golden globe dropped

from the rows of green trees beyond that led to purple mountains, a

senorita just as golden. And he thought he’d heard about this place

before. Hadn’t Pancho spoken to him of it, as though from his own

experience, that day they’d met beside the gas-less Zephyr? Yes just this

place, where Prosper had thought to go and Pancho claimed to have

gone, but maybe not. Well anyone could want to be there, now; surely

anyone could believe, anyone who’d been long on the road and done

poorly, that such a place existed, and could be reached.

“No matter,” he heard Pancho say, to no one. “No matter.”

April was over when Diane walked out of the house in the Heights for the

first time since coming home from the hospital with Danny Jr. (her

son’s name till Danny agreed or insisted on something else, his letters

had grown ever shorter and rarer as time went on). Danny Jr. had been

born premature, small as a skinned rabbit and as red and withered-

looking as one too, but the doctor said he was fine and he’d fatten up

fine. And his back seemed straight so far: she couldn’t bring herself to

ask the doctor if he’d seen anything that was, well, and so she’d believe

it was fine too, and stroked his tiny back and tried to guess. She’d

insisted on the hospital, first in her family to be born in one, just

because. It’s healthful, Mamí, and I’ve got the money.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 365

That day she’d told her mother she just needed to be in motion, and

while the baby slept she’d just walk down toward the shore, make her

legs work, walk without that ten-pound bag of rice she felt she’d been

carrying forever. As she went gently downward past buildings and

streets she’d known since childhood she began to see, there below her,

people who were coming out of their houses; coming out, rushing out,

and embracing others who were also rushing into the street. She kept

on. More people were coming out now from the houses around her,

excited, elated, frantic even. She heard bells rung, church bells. Sirens.

More people in the street, hugging and cheering and lifting children in

their arms, men kissing women. Girls rode on the shoulders of men,

some in uniforms. In a moment she was surrounded, people taking her

arms as they took others, the whole lot of them seeming about to fly up

into the air in a group.

What was it? What was going on? She had to listen to them till she

understood.

The war was over in Europe. It was on the radio. The Russians had

taken Berlin, and the Germans had given up. They said Hitler was

dead. It was over, over.

A fat man gave her a kiss on the cheek, a fat woman embraced her

and she embraced the woman back, and they all went spinning and

spiraling down the streets toward the ocean crying out that it was over.

Some of them dropped out and went to sit and weep.

Over. It was so bright and sunny. Of course it wasn’t over, not for

Danny and not for her, but still it was over, and you could let your

heart go for a moment to rise up among all the others, and you could

link arms with strangers and laugh and smile.

8

Prosper Olander got his own white pink slip in an envelope stuffed

with bills and coins, a week’s severance pay, which wasn’t owed

to him under contract but given anyway. To him it would always

seem—well, symbolic, or appropriate, or suggestive of the shape

of time, or something—that his own employment should end on VE

Day, and later memorials and celebrations of that date would fill him

with a strange unease he couldn’t quite explain to himself, as though

he should no longer exist. He thought at that time that Upp ’n’ Adam

were going to be out of a job too, and so was Anna Bandanna, and

where they went he would now go, wherever that might be.

For a time he went nowhere, living in Pancho’s house on Z Street

waiting for bills he couldn’t pay to show up in his mailbox. Van Damme

Aero and the union had information about unemployment insurance,

which somehow Prosper feared to apply for; maybe it’d be discovered

he should never have been employed in the first place.

Mostly nothing arrived in that brass box at the Van Damme post

office, to which he had a tiny brass key. He had his monthly letter from

Bea, saying among other things that his uncles had got in trouble for

dealing in forged ration stamps, which didn’t surprise Bea any. She

didn’t think they’d go to jail, but it was dreadful that someone in your

own family, no matter how distant, could do such a thing.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 367

(It was true: Bill and Eddy, attorneys, had a struggle getting the

boys off lightly. Without Prosper their wares had grown cheaper and

less professional, and they’d taken to pressing loose stamps on gas sta-

tions, who would then sell extra gas to special customers at a profit

and turn in the fake stamps for it. Not every pump jockey thought this

was a good idea, and the boys had started threatening some of them—

their scheme was turning into a racket—until one plump little miss in

billed cap and leather bow tie on the South Side of the city took the

stamps with a smile and then turned them in to the authorities. Where’d

she get the nerve? Mert and Fred also hadn’t known that by now the

paper used for the real government stamp books was specially treated,

and if dipped in a chlorine solution would turn a pretty blue, and their

paper didn’t. George Bill put in evidence Mert’s spotless record in the

last war, and Fred pleaded he’d only got into the game to provide for

his crippled nephew.)

The same mail that brought Bea’s letter brought another envelope,

the stationery of a hotel in a town in an adjacent state. Prosper thought

he recognized the old-fashioned hand that had addressed it. Inside the

envelope was a postal money order for four hundred dollars, and a

letter.

Well, Prosper, I write to let you know what’s become of me and

of my plans, and also to ask of you a favor in memory of all the

time we’ve spent together. Well it turns out that the group that I

was to meet here and make some plans with weren’t able, or

weren’t willing, to assemble. Not all or many of them anyway.

And frankly the ones who did come were not the ones I would

have relied on. I just can’t work with that kind of material,

Prosper, their good hearts and intentions (if any) aside. I have

sent them all away.

Moreover, the big backer I was led to believe would be

coming here to meet me and look over the plans for the Harmo-

nious City, which I have had printed at some expense, he has

declined to show up, having I suppose some more important or

practical projects to interest himself in. To tell the truth he is not

the first person to hold out before me a mirage of support with

big promises that fade away like morning dew. I have never let

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

disappointments like that touch me. I suspect that like the others

he merely wanted to build a “Shangri-la” of his own atop my

solid foundation, which would thus have failed even if he could

have understood the thinking behind it. So there’s an end to

that.

I may appear to you embittered, and perhaps I am at least

finally disillusioned, and being as old as I am and no longer

employed or employable I find myself unable and more impor-

tantly unwilling to rise up off the floor once again. I have there-

fore determined on ending my life by my own hand rather than

letting incompetence, ill-health, and poverty have their way

with me. I have paid for a further week at this lodging, after

which they will find I have no more to give them nor any use for

their hospitality.

What I would ask of you, dear friend, is that in the next

days you will come here to this town, where you would not

want otherwise to journey I’m sure, and collect my remains,

both my own poor person and more importantly the papers

and plans to which with painful care I have devoted so many

years, not to enrich or aggrandize myself, no, but for the

increase of human happiness. What though I have failed? The

plans, the philosophy of Attraction and Harmony, these

remain, and if there is any hope and any justice in this

wondrous world we inhabit, they will lie like seeds through

winter upon winter, to be watered and nourished and grow in

the end.

Well enough of all that, just get here if you can, I’ll probably

be on ice at the morgue on my way to the potter’s field, but if

you get here in time they won’t throw me out. The enclosed for

whatever expenses a simple burial might entail, the rest for your

good self.

You know it’s a funny thing how a plan of suicide simplifies

your life. No reason any longer to pay the rent, answer your

mail, wash, dress, even to eat. It’s a strange relief to know that

you’ve had to make a choice between ham and eggs and flap-

jacks for the last time in your life. But I maunder, my friend,

and it is now time to bid you farewell in this life, and to ask

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 369

your pardon for these obligations I have laid upon you. If you

don’t fulfill them I will be none the wiser, of course, but here’s

hoping.

It was signed “Pancho,” and on another sheet of the same statio-

nery was a note headed To Whom It May Concern, that granted to

Prosper Olander the power to take possession of all his effects and

make such disposition of his remains as he deems appropriate, and this

note was signed Pelagius Johann Notzing, BA, Esq., and was dated

three days before.

“What the hell,” he said aloud. “What the hell.”

Sal Mass was there trying to open her box, standing on tiptoe with

her key to reach it, she’d tried to get a lower one but was told they had

to be assigned in alphabetical order. “What is it?” she asked.

Prosper held out the letter to her and watched as she read it. After

frowning over the first sentences she suddenly gasped, and clutched the

letter to her bosom as though to hush its voice, looking at Prosper in

horror. He gestured that she read on. When she was all done she looked

up again, a different face now.

“That god damn son of a bitch,” she said.

Prosper knew who she meant: not Pancho.

Almost as though they’d instantly had the same idea, or communi-

cated it to each other by Wings of Thought as the ads in The Sunny

Side said, Prosper and Sal together went out of the post office and

toward the Community Center where, unless the sun had stopped

going east to west, Larry would at this time of day be found in the

games room playing pool and jawing.

He was there. He saw Prosper and Sal approaching him and took

the damp unlit cigar from his mouth, grinning appreciatively. “Well if

it isn’t,” he said, but then Prosper had reached him and thrust Pancho’s

letter on him.

“Read this,” he said.

Larry looked it over. “It’s not addressed to me.”

“Just read it.”

They watched him read, the game suspended, Sal with her fists on

her hips.

“Oh jeez,” Larry said. “Oh for cripe’s sake.”

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

“You oughta,” Sal said, “you oughta,” but couldn’t think what he

oughta, and stopped.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Larry said. “I had no choice.”

“Don’t give me that,” Prosper said. “We’re quite aware.”

“Get the hell out of here,” Larry said. “That was business and I did

what I had to do.”

Later Prosper would try to think whether he’d actually had Larry’s

own advice in his mind as the next moments unfolded. A little crowd

had gathered. “Somebody ought to punch your nose,” Prosper said.

“Nobody’s punching anybody,” Larry said.

“We’ll see,” Prosper said, with all the implacable menace he could

muster. “Come on.” He whirled and started toward the door, Larry

following him.

“Cut it out,” he called to Prosper. “Don’t be a dope.”

“What are you, a coward? Scared of something?” Prosper said this

in fury straight in front of him as he reached the door of the games

room, grabbed the knob, and pushed it open. Larry was just exiting

behind him when Prosper flung the door shut hard and hit Larry smack

in the face. Then as Larry, dazed, pushed it open again to come after

him, Prosper swung around on his heels and with one lifted crutch

caught Larry a blow on the cheek that made the onlookers now crowd-

ing the exit gasp in horror or amazement.

That was all Prosper was holding in the way of an attack, and set-

ting himself then as firmly as he could, he waited for Larry to fall upon

him. His heart felt like it would tear him apart. Larry, red-faced and

with teeth bared, seemed ready now to do terrible things, but after a

pause he throttled down with awesome effort and backed away; threw

his hand into the air, Aw beat it, and turned back into the Community

Center, pushing through the crowd. Sal came squirming out almost

under his arm, went to Prosper and stood beside him as though to shel-

ter him with her own unassailability. “Bully!” she yelled back.

Ironic cheers for the two of them followed them out into the day.

“You’re going to go?” Sal said. It was she who’d rescued Pancho’s

letter in the donnybrook.

“Of course I am.” His heart still pounding.

“I’ll go too,” she said.

“No, Sal. You don’t need to say that.”

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 371

“Listen, mister. He was my friend too.”

That was true: for all her mocking tone, Sal had sat as quietly as

anyone could have been expected to as Pancho expatiated, and Prosper

thought that was about what Pancho’d mean by a friend. “Well,” he

said. “What about your shift?”

“I’m quitting,” Sal said, “if you want to know. I’m blowing.”

“You are? What about Al?”

“Al and I,” Sal said in that record-played-too-fast voice of hers, “are

quits.”

Prosper slowed down. Sal was about the only Associate around who

had to skip to keep up with him. “What? That’s hard to believe.”

“I know,” said Sal. “People look at the two of us and it’s like the

little man and woman on the wedding cake. How could they be apart?

Well lemme tell you.”

“I figured it was a love match. I admit.”

“To tell you the truth,” Sal said, “it was a kind of marriage of con-

venience. And it ain’t convenient anymore.”

“What’s he done?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. When do we leave?”

Sal and Prosper parted at the Assembly Building, Sal to go hand in her

resignation (as she put it) and Prosper to go back to Z Street and pre-

pare for a journey, a train journey with no aid but what Sal, who came

up just past his waist, could provide. He was headed that way when he

felt the presence of someone large coming up behind.

“Listen,” Larry said, without other preface. “What are you going to

do, are you going to do what he asked, go collect him and that?”

“Yes,” Prosper said, looking ahead with dignity, and some fear.

“Alone?”

“Sal Mass just said she’d come too.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake. The two of you? That’s ridiculous. You’ll

pull into town like some carny show. Nobody’ll take you seriously.

There’s legal matters there to resolve.”

Prosper kept on, following his nose.

“Look,” Larry said. “I’ve got no responsibility for this. None. But I

can help. I’ll come along. You can’t do it, you and her.”

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

Prosper let that sink in for a few steps. “You can get the time off?”

Larry stopped suddenly, and Prosper did too. Larry fetched breath

and looked to heaven. “Well,” he said, “actually, I’m quitting.”

The doors of the Assembly Building were rolling open, the little

tractors arriving to do their duty. The nose of another completed Pax

was revealed, then its wide wings.

“Well this is quite a day,” Prosper said.

All that Prosper would ever learn about what had caused Larry to turn

in his badge and resign his stewardship wasn’t enough to make a story,

and Prosper wasn’t about to delve deeply. There was a woman, a

woman at the plant, and an angry husband: Larry seemed visibly to

break out in a sweat, like a comic strip worrier, when he let even that

much slip. Prosper’d been tempted to say a lot then, maybe tell Larry

Pancho’s theories about war and the sex urge: but no.

“Well anyway,” Prosper said. They were all three on the local train

from Ponca to this city over the state line where Pancho lay dead. Sal in

the opposite seat was asleep, her small feet not reaching the floor. “I’m

sorry I whacked you with the stick there. I’ve been meaning to say.”

Larry touched the side of his face. “Didn’t hurt.”

“Good. Anyway thanks for not punching my lights out.”

“What?” Larry tugged at his collar. He was wearing a fawn-col-

ored suit, a bit too tight, and his suitcase was in the overhead rack: he

was headed farther, somewhere.

“Oh. You know.” Prosper punched the air.

Larry was watching him with an odd look, a look Prosper had seen

in the faces of women more than men: that look toward themselves as

much as at you, waiting to hear their own permission to say some-

thing, maybe something they’ve never said before.

“Well,” he said. “Look. There’s a lot of stories about me. That aren’t

all what you’d call true.”

“Oh?” The stories that Prosper had heard about Larry were all Lar-

ry’s telling. Prosper removed all suggestion of an opinion from his face,

but Larry seemed to strangle on the effort of saying whatever it was

that might come next, and instead removed his hat and furiously wiped

the sweatband with a large handkerchief.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 373

Midday the train they’d taken toddled into the central station,

which had no platforms, only a little wedding-cake building beside the

tracks. Sal went out the door and down, leaping from the last step as

the conductor looked on. Then Larry. Then Prosper, who stood at the

door looking at the steep declivity. Easy enough maybe to go down the

first two steps, handy rails to hold: but the last drop to the ground was

going to take some thought. The conductor, ready to wave the engineer

on, gazed up at him in a kind of disinterested impatience. Finally Larry,

perceiving him stuck, stepped up.

“Come on!” he said. “I’ll getcha!”

All the things that Larry standing there arms open was capable of

doing or not doing passed as in a shiver over Prosper, but he didn’t

seem to have a choice. He dropped himself down the first step and then

bent forward as far as he could so that Larry could take him under the

armpits. Then he gave himself over to him. Strong as he was, Larry

staggered for a second under the weight and Prosper knew they were

going to go over, but Larry held and Prosper got his crutches set and

propped himself, removing his weight from Larry. Larry blew in impa-

tience or embarrassment, twisted his hat right on his head, and walked

away; neither man ever mentioned the moment.

The hotel was across a wide bare street from the station, a wooden

structure with a long front porch where a row of rockers sat. The words

grand hotel painted across the facade were worn somewhat; they

were supplemented by the same words in neon above the porch. Not the

kind of place important oil millionaires would be found, in Prosper’s

view, not that he knew anything about it. Beyond this place and rising

above, the newer buildings, like Ponca City’s, plain or fancy. Even as

they crossed the street to reach it, they could see what they should not

have been able to see, and they could do and say nothing until they were

entirely sure it was what it certainly seemed to be: Pancho Notzing,

seated in a rocking chair, feeding bits of something to a little dog.

“Now what,” Larry said, striding forward. “Now what in hell.”

When all three of them stood before the porch Pancho said, “Hello,

friends.”

“You’re supposed to be at the morgue,” Sal said. “I came a long way

to see that. If you just got out to come and greet us I suggest you beat it

back there.”

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

“What in hell,” Larry said again.

“Hello, Pancho,” Prosper said. “I’m glad to see you.”

Pancho nodded solemnly but without seeming to feel that a quick

explanation was in order. The little dog put a paw on his leg to remind

him of what he’d been up to as the others arrived. For the first time it

occurred to Prosper that Pancho, who spent his life and time and

energy planning for the true deep happiness of men and women, every

one of them different and precious, didn’t really perceive the existence

of actual other people. “Well as you see,” he said at last, “I did not in

the end take the step I wrote you about. I was on the point of sending

you a telegram to say so, but approaching the dark door and then

retreating took such an effort that I could do nothing further.”

“It’s all right,” Prosper said.

“All those common questions and tasks that I said had flown away

came right back again—in prospect anyway—and it was a bit appall-

ing. Stops you cold.”

“It’s all right.”

“Life,” said Pancho. He took a bit of something from a plate in his

lap and gave it to the dog, who snapped it up and looked for more.

“Who’s the dog?” Sal asked, unable to frame a different question.

“A stray, belongs to no one,” Pancho said. “As far as I can tell.”

“So you mean to say,” Larry said, “that we came all this way, ready

for a funeral, wearing the suit and tie, and there was never a reason for

it?”

“Larry,” said Pancho. “I can’t imagine why you’ve come, and I’m

sorry to have disappointed you, but I am honored. I am deeply hon-

ored.”

“Aw hell,” said Larry, and he snatched the hat from his head, seem-

ing to be on the point of throwing it to the dusty ground and stamping

on it; instead he jammed it back on his head and turned away, looking

down the empty street, hands in his pockets.

“Question is,” said Sal, “if we can’t bury you, what are we going to

do with you?”

“And yourself?” Pancho asked.

“Well that too,” Sal said. She’d taken a seat on the edge of the porch,

her feet on the step below, looking more than usual like a child, and

petted the little black dog, who seemed to take to her.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 375

“We’re all out of a job,” Prosper said. “One way or another.”

Pancho stared at Larry’s back, and Larry’s pose softened, though he

didn’t turn.

“Him too,” said Prosper.

There seemed to be nothing for it except to go into the dining room of

the hotel, where overhead fans spooned the air around and wicker

chairs were set at the tables, and treat the dead man to a lunch; all his

money was in the check he’d sent to Prosper. What should they do

now? Some ideas more or less reasonable were put forward. For his

part, Prosper knew he could go back to Bea and May’s house, they’d

take him in, and certainly there’d be something he could do somewhere

in the art line, after all his experience. So long as he could get into the

building and into a chair in front of a desk. It was the safest thing, and

it was hard for somebody like him not to think Safety First. Safety was

rare and welcome. He’d had some close calls; in fact it sometimes

seemed that, for him, every call was close.

“I suppose you might not have heard,” Larry said, tucking a napkin

into his collar, “that while you were busy here, we won the war. Against

Hitler anyway. He’s done.”

“I did hear that, Larry,” Pancho said. “On that day I was reminded

of a passage in a book I often carry with me. For consolation, though

it hasn’t worked so well that way lately.”

He fished in his coat pockets, but found no book there, and then

bowed his head, clasped his hands, and began to speak, as though he

asked a blessing before their meal. “ ‘This is the day,’ ” he said, gravely

and simply, “ ‘which down the void abysm, at the Earth-born’s spell

yawns for Heaven’s despotism. And Conquest is dragged captive

through the deep.’ ”

He lifted his eyes. “Shelley,” he said. “Prometheus. The Earth-born.

Friend to man. Unbound and triumphant.”

The rest of them looked at one another, but got no help. Prosper

wondered if this strange gentle certitude with which Pancho spoke had

been acquired somehow in his trip toward the other side, as May

always called it, and back again.

“ ‘And if with infirm hand,’ ” Pancho went on, and lifted his own,

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

“ ‘Eternity, Mother of many acts and hours, should free the serpent

that would clasp her with his length’ ”—here Pancho seized the air dra-

matically—“ ‘these are the spells by which to reassume an empire o’er

the disentangled doom.’ ”

He seemed to arise slightly from his chair, enumerating them, the

spells, on his fingers: “ ‘To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite. To

forgive wrongs darker than death or night.’ ”

Sal and Prosper looked at Larry.

“ ‘To defy Power, which seems omnipotent. To love, and bear. To

hope till Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.’ ”

Full hand open high above them: “ ‘Neither to change, nor falter, nor

repent.’ ”

“Hey I have an idea,” said Sal.

“ ‘This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be good, great and glorious, beau-

tiful and free! This is alone Life! Joy! Empire! And Victory!’ ”

He was done, sank, put his hands on the table; lifted his head and

smiled at them, as though awaking and glad to find them there.

“ ’Scuse me, but you know what?” Sal got up and knelt on the chair

seat to address them. “Right this minute, in San Francisco, California,

the United Nations are meeting. You’ve read about it. All the ones on

our side in the war, and all the others too, that’s the idea. They’re there

talking about peace in the world and how to do it. How to make it last

this time. About the rights everybody should have, all of us, how to

keep them from being taken away.”

“Four freedoms,” said Prosper. “Yes.”

“So, Mr. Notzing. Why don’t you go there? Bring your plans and

your proposals, your writings. That’s the bunch that needs to hear

them. Am I right?”

She looked around at the others, who had no idea if she was or

wasn’t.

“Oh,” said Pancho. “Oh, well, I don’t know, no, I.”

She scrambled down from her chair and came to his side. “Oh come

on!” she said.

“Mrs. Roosevelt will be there,” Larry said, lifting his eyes as though

he saw her, just overhead.

“We’ll all go,” Sal cried. “You’ve got a car, haven’t you? We’re all

flush. Let’s do it.”

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 377

“Will you all?” Pancho asked with something like humility. Nobody

said no. “Very well,” he said.

“Yes,” said Sal.

“We’ll just take French leave. When we choose, we’ll return for

what we’ve left behind—if we think there’s any reason to.”

“It’ll all be there when we get back.”

“The things and the people.”

“Yes.”

“If you don’t mind,” Larry said, and picked up his fork and knife,

“I’d like to have my lunch before we go. Maybe you people can live on

air, but not me.”

Outside on the porch as they all went out—Pancho with the two bags

that he had intended to leave for Prosper, still neatly labeled as to their

contents—the little black dog was still waiting, and happy to see

them.

“We’ll take him too,” Sal said.

“Oh no,” Larry said. “I hate dogs.”

But she’d already picked up the mutt and was holding him tenderly

and laughing as he licked at her face. Pancho led them to the side street

where the car was parked.

“Best be on our way,” Pancho said, climbing into the driver’s seat.

“Look at that sky.”

A roiling darkness did seem to be building to the north, and little

startled puffs of breeze reached them. Larry licked his forefinger and

held it aloft. “Headed the other way,” he averred. “Back toward where

we came from.”

“So we’re off,” said Pancho, and turned the key.

“ ‘Git for home, Bruno!’ ” Sal shouted from the back.

“There’s no place like home,” said Prosper; he said it though he

didn’t know and had never known just what that meant. It did occur to

him that if seen from the right point of view, they in the Zephyr were

like one of those movies where the picture, which has all along been

moving with the people in it one after the other or in twos and threes

wherever they go, takes a final stance, and the people move away from

it. (Prosper, in the days when he’d come to pick up Elaine or wait while

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

she changed, had seen the beginnings and endings of many movies, the

same movie many times.) Maybe there’s one more kiss, or one more

piece of comic business, and then the car with the lovers or the family

or the ill-assorted comedians in it moves off, hopeful suitcase tied on,

and it goes away from you down the road: and you understand that

you’re not going to see where they get to or what they’re headed for,

even as those two big words arrive on the screen to tell you so.

RECESSIONAL

It was the fiercest tornado ever recorded in Oklahoma history, which

made it remarkable in all the history of weather, because the torna-

does of Oklahoma are themselves top of the standings in almost any

year. It didn’t touch down long or go far, but what it touched it

turned to flinders and waste, and left nothing standing.

Up north where it began Muriel Gunderson was on duty at the

weather station at Little Tom Field, and took the astonishing readings

sent in by the radiosonde equipment that she’d sent aloft attached to its

balloon. Not that you couldn’t already tell that something big was

going to roll over the prairie within the next twelve hours or so: back

on the farm the horses would be biting one another and the windmill

vanes trembling in the dead air as though ready to start flailing as soon

as they perceived the front.

The radiosonde was a blessing most ways. A little packet of radio

instruments, no bigger than a shoe box, that could measure wind

speed, air pressure, humidity, and temperature as a function of height,

and send it all back to the radio receivers in the shack. No more follow-

ing the ascent of the balloon with the theodolite—the instruments

knew where they were, and kept transmitting no matter how far above

the cloud cover they went. Women around the country were putting

these little packages on balloons, sending them up, and then (the draw-

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

back) recovering them after they’d fallen to earth on their little para-

chutes. There were instructions on the container for anyone who found

it about how to mail it back, but in the daytime you just went out in the

direction of the wind and looked for it.

Muriel was damp everywhere her clothes bunched. Tootie lay under

the porch as still as though dead, except for his panting tongue. Muriel

began taking down the readings that were coming in from the instru-

ments. She’d had to have training in all of it, RAOB or radio observa-

tion, the Thermistor and the Hygristor, like twin giants in a fairy tale;

it still made her nervous always that she hadn’t got it right.

Well this number sure didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem that baro-

metric pressure could get that low. Radiosonde equipment was myste-

rious: in the old method you knew you could get it wrong, and how

you’d be likely to get it wrong, but now it was as though only the

machine could know if it was wrong, and it wasn’t telling.

Maybe she’d set the baroswitch incorrectly before she let it go.

Well who knows. Better to trust the reading than to guess, she

guessed.

She went to the Teletype and began typing up the readings. The

Teletype was new too, her words and numbers transmitted to other

machines elsewhere that typed them at the same time she did. When

Muriel got to the baro pressure number she put it in, and the time and

height, and then put in a new line:

This is the number, folks, no joke.

Down under the porch, Tootie lifted her head, as though catching a

smell, and ceased to pant.

The twister itself didn’t touch down near that airfield, and Ponca City

itself was largely spared too, a fact that would be remarked on in the

churches the following day—the fine houses and old trees, the Poncan,

the Civic Center, they all stood and still stand, the high school and the

library. But out along Bodark Creek and to the west it churned the

earth and the blackjack oaks and the works of man in its funnel like

the fruits and berries tossed into a Waring blender. Those little houses,

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 383

A Street to Z Street, Pancho’s, Sal’s, Connie’s, never firmly attached to

the earth in the first place, were lifted up from their slabs and stirred

unresisting into the air, block after block, with all their tar paper, bath-

tubs, bicycles, beds, tables, fretwork-framed proverbs ( Home Sweet

Home), Navajo blankets, Kit-Kat clocks with wagging tails, pictures of

Jesus, potted cacti, knives, forks, and spoons, odds and ends.

It was bad, it was devastating, but it was one of those disasters that

manage to inflict wondrous destruction without really harming anyone

much. For in all of Henryville blown away that afternoon there was

not a single—the word had by then changed from a colorless technical

term to one that came into our mouths, some of our mouths, at the

worst moments of our lives—not a single casualty. A beloved dog; a

caged bird; some miraculous escapes beneath beds or sturdy tables.

The reason was not Providence, though, really, or even wonderful luck;

it was that there was almost no one in Henryville that day.

That day—it was the greatest in Horse Offen’s career, the defin-

ing act of it anyway and certainly productive of an image that would

remain before memory’s eye—that day was the day the last rivets

were banged into the five hundredth Pax bomber to be turned out at

Van Damme Aero Ponca City, and Horse had persuaded Manage-

ment (his memo passing upward right to the broad bare desk of

Henry Van Damme) that every single person at the plant, from

sweepers to lunchroom ladies to engineers to managers, ought to be

brought onto the floor for one vast picture of the plane and them-

selves: a portrait of the greatest team and the greatest plane in the

greatest war of all time. Everybody’d get a two-dollar bonus for

showing up off-shift.

So we came and crowded in together, complaining—the heat, the

closeness, the air like a fusty blanket, the spirit dejected, the mind dull.

Under the shadow of those wings we sheltered, though of course not all

of us were responsible for its coming into being, some of the smilers in

the back having just been hired and many of those who had indeed

riveted the dural and calibrated the instruments and hooked up the

wiring already gone, dispersed, headed home. Anyway the picture—we

nearly rebelled before the huge banquet camera could be focused and

fired, Horse with bullhorn mother-henning us ceaselessly—the picture

is that one you still see. Connie is in front, beside Rollo Stallworthy,

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

and some of the other Teenie Weenies are scattered here and there; you

can find their faces if you knew them.

Then as we stood there, about to break up, the twister came on,

prefigured by the deep nameless dread induced in humans by a precipi-

tous fall in barometric pressure, and then by weird airs whipping

around in the great space and even rocking the ship we stood around,

as though it shuddered. The windows darkened. Soon we could hear it,

distant sound of a devouring maw, we didn’t know that it had already

eaten our houses and their carports, but the Oklahomans and others

among us who knew the signs announced now what it was. As it bore

down on us, the buildings all around were pressed on, the dormitories,

the Community Center, and we heard them shattering and flinging

their parts away to clang against the roofs and windows of ours, and

there might have been a panic if it hadn’t been clear to everyone that

we were already in the one place we would have run to. We were

warned to stay away from the windows, and we milled a little, but

there wasn’t much room, and we hardly even spoke or made a sound

except for a universal moan when all at once the lights went out.

When it had clearly passed over, we went out. A little rain had

fallen. The B-30s lay around the trash-speckled field like dead seagulls

cast on a beach after a storm. One had been lifted up and laid over the

back of another, as though “treading” it like a cock does a hen, to

make more. One flipped halfway over on bent wing. They’d been made,

after all, to be as light as possible. We walked among them afraid and

grieving and delighted.

One death could be attributed to the big wind. A ship had been pushed

forward, lifted, and fallen again so that its left landing gear had buck-

led and it slumped sideways. Connie and Rollo, assigned to the team

checking the ships for damage, found Al Mass in the forward cabin,

dead. He hadn’t been hurt in the fall or in the crushing of the cabin,

and the coroner determined or at least made a good guess that he’d

died of a heart attack from the stress of the storm and maybe the

sudden shock of the plane’s inexplicable takeoff. Midgets aren’t known

for strong hearts, the coroner averred. Rollo and Connie gave evidence

that supported the theory of a heart attack, but (without testifying to

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 385

it, give the little guy a break) they both supposed that it might have

come a little before the big wind, since Al was without his pants when

they came upon him, and nearby was the abandoned brassiere of

another interloper, who’d apparently left him there, alive or more likely

dead: but who that was we’d never learn.

Al’s buried in the Odd Fellows cemetery there in Ponca City; Van

Damme Aero acquired a small area that’s given over to Associates who

died in the building of the Pax there from 1943 to 1945 and had no

other place to lie. There are twelve, nine of them women. They fell

from cranes, they stepped in front of train cars, they were hit by engines

breaking loose from stationary test rigs, got blood poisoning from tool

injuries, dropped dead from stroke. It was dangerous work, the way we

did it then.

That ship they found Al in was actually the one that, years after,

was hauled out to repose in the field across Hubbard Road from the

Municipal Airport, wingless and tail-less. The story of Al and how he

was found had been forgotten, or hadn’t remained attached to this par-

ticular fuselage, and no ghosts walked. By then what was left of Hen-

ryville had been bulldozed away, unsalvageable and anyway unwanted,

the land was more saleable without that brief illusion of a town, though

the streets that the men and women had walked and biked to work

along, and driven on in their prewar cars, and sat beside in the eve-

nings to drink beer and listen to the radio, can still be traced, if you

open your mind and heart to the possibility of their being there. There’s

a local club devoted to recovering the layout of it all, the dormitories,

the clinics, the shops and railroad tracks, and marking the faint street

crossings, A to Z. But that’s all.

Afterword

To take on any aspect of the American military effort in World War

II as a subject for fiction, especially any aspect of the air war, is

to invite criticism from the very many experts who know more

about it than you ever will—not only archivists and historians

and buffs, but also those who remember firsthand the planes and the

factories and the people that built them. In part to evade the heavy

responsibility of accuracy, I chose in this story to invent a bomber that

never existed, though it is modeled on a couple that did. Somewhat on

a whim, I placed the factory that is making this imaginary bomber in

Ponca City, Oklahoma, though there was no such factory there—the

nearest was the Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas. I have taken other

smaller liberties with the historical record, some obvious, some perhaps

not. Some things that might appear to be invented are true: the multiple

suicides of Part One, Chapter Two are among these. The true story of

the Women Airforce Service Pilots (as told by—among others—Adela

Riek Scharr in Sisters in the Sky) is more extraordinary than any

fictional account could suggest. I have drawn extensively on the

personal accounts of the many women who went to work in the

munitions plants, gas stations, weather stations, and offices, who drove

trucks, flew planes, and succeeded in hundreds of jobs they had never

expected to do. For most of them, and for the many African American

388 / A F T E R W O R D

men and women, Hispanics, Native Americans, and people with dis-

abilities who also served, the end of the war meant returning to the

status quo ante: but things could never be restored just as they had

been, and the war years contained the seeds of change that would even-

tually grow again.

Among the hundred-odd books that a complete bibliography for

this novel would include, I am most indebted to A Mouthful of Rivets:

Women at Work in World War II by Nancy Baker Wise and Christy

Wise. The first-person accounts collected there are an enduring monu-

ment to the women of that period. Firsthand accounts like Slacks and

Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory by Constance Bowman,

and Punch In, Susie! A Woman’s War Factory Diary by Nell Giles,

were helpful. Don’t You Know There’s a War On? The American

Home Front, 1941–1945 by Richard R. Lingeman was important for

the background, as was Alistair Cooke’s America, the recently repub-

lished account of Cooke’s car trip across the country in 1941 to 1942.

Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War,

1929–1945 by David M. Kennedy was illuminating on the details of

policy, particularly the draft. Susan G. Sterrett’s Wittgenstein Flies a

Kite was my source for most of the stories about early flight, including

the remarkable one previewed in its title.

Just as useful day to day were the Internet sites with information on

a thousand topics. From the official site of the B-36 bomber I learned—

after deciding that my bomber would be called the Pax and would be

struck by a tornado in Oklahoma—that the B-36 was called the Peace-

maker, and a fleet of them was damaged by a tornado in Texas. I found

pictures of train car interiors on the Katy Railroad, studied salon hair-

styles of the 1930s, marveled at Teenie Weenies Sunday pages, learned

about the rise of sports betting in the war, read about poor posture and

nursing care for spinal fusion in 1940, and far far more.

I am grateful to Michael J. Lombardi of the Boeing Archives in

Seattle for spending a day finding references and answering my ques-

tions, and to Andrew Labovsky and all the crew of Doc, the B-29 being

lovingly restored at the Kansas Aviation Museum in Wichita, for allow-

ing me up into the plane, as well as supplying me with facts from their

bottomless well. In Ponca City my very great thanks to Sandra Graves

and Loyd Bishop of the Ponca City Library for their great help on a

A F T E R W O R D / 389

peculiar errand—casting their hometown for a part it never played.

Bret A. Carter was generous with his collection of Ponca City and Kaw

County photographs. I hope that they, and the reader as well, will

understand that this book of mine is a Ponca City (and indeed a Home

Front and a War) of the Mind, and that all digressions from the ascer-

tainable facts, whether intentional or not, are entirely my own.

Many of the learned and curious correspondents, if that’s the word,

who read and comment on my online journal went in search of answers

to questions I posed there, like the source of the phrase “Git for home,

Bruno!” and the price of condoms in 1944 (about $1.50 for a tin of

three; they found pictures, too). To LSB I owe the knowledge and

understanding I have of what became of people with disabilities at that

time, and before and after, which is at the heart of this fiction.

About the Author

JOHN CROWLEY lives in the hills above the

Connecticut River in northern Massachusetts

with his wife and twin daughters. He is the

author of ten previous novels as well as the

short fiction collection Novelties & Souvenirs.

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on your favorite HarperCollins author.

ALSO BY JOHN CROWLEY

Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land

The Translator

Little, Big

THE ÆGYPT CYCLE

The Solitudes

Love & Sleep

Dæmonomania

Endless Things

OTHERWISE: THREE NOVELS

The Deep

Beasts

Engine Summer

Novelties & Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction

In Other Words: Essays and Reviews

Credits

Designed by Kate Nichols

Jacket design by Mary Schuck

Jacket photograph © Mark Kauffman/Time & Life Pictures/Getty

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are

drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely

coincidental.

FOUR FREEDOMS. Copyright © 2009 by John Crowley. All rights reserved

under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment

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of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled,

reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage

and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or

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Document Outline

Title Page

Dedication Page

Contents

Prelude

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Two

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Three

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Four

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Recessional

Afterword

About the Author

Also by John Crowley

Credits

Copyright Notice

About the Publisher