Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  man as he is: a creature of his needs and his desires. Nothing wrong

  with it—I take no exception to it, even if I could. It seems to me that we

  have no business telling people what they should or shouldn’t want.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 9

  Happiness means meeting the desires a person has, not suppressing

  them.”

  “Happiness is a plate of ribs, Mr. Notzing,” said a young fellow,

  raising his plate, sucking a greasy thumb.

  “Have more,” said Pancho, flipping a rack and watching the happy

  flames leap up. “Nobody in this present world has enough pleasure.

  They feel it, too. The poor man never gets enough, and he hates the

  rich man because the rich man supposedly gets his fill—but he doesn’t.

  The rich are eternally afraid that the poor will take away what plea-

  sures they have, they indulge themselves constantly but never feel

  filled—they feel guilty. Meanwhile they hoard the wealth, more than

  they can ever spend or use or eat or drink.”

  “Are you saying,” Sal Mass chirped up, “Mr. Notzing, sir, are you

  saying money don’t buy happiness?”

  Pancho Notzing was immune to sarcasm. Those close enough to

  hear her odd chirpy voice laughed. Old Sal.

  Sal was the only one of the Teenie Weenies (except for her husband,

  Al Mass) who really was one, and not only in the sense that she was an

  actual midget. Ten years before she had played one of the little charac-

  ters in a promotion for a canned food company; she’d flown, she said,

  ten thousand miles and into three hundred airports, dressed as the

  Lady of Fashion, her husband, Al, as the Cook, inviting people aboard

  the Ford Trimotor they traveled in to look over the cans and packages

  of food, the Pepper Pickles, the Chipped Beef, the Hearts of Wheat, the

  Succotash, the Harvard Beets, the Soda Crackers. Handing out free

  samples and little cookbooks. She knew she disappointed the children

  who came, because the Teenie Weenies in the funny papers were really

  teeny, no larger than your thumb, and she and Al were small but not

  that small, and now and again she’d get a kick in the shins from some

  kid who wanted her to be at least smaller than he was, which is what

  all kids wanted she decided, though it didn’t explain why grown-ups

  came and clambered into their plane and made much of them. What

  Sal wanted was to fly the Ford herself, but no amount of solicitude, or

  pleading, or showing off, or anything could get the pilot to do more

  than laugh at her. Hell with him. Al just read the paper and smoked his

  cigar and snorted. Hey, Hon, here we are in the funnies—see, this

  week I try to figure out how to cut up a grape with a saw—Jesus. A

  10 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  little later that food company fired them and from then on used a

  couple of little kids instead for half the price. That was 1941, and Sal

  and Al got hired by Van Damme Aero’s West Coast plant to work on

  their A-21 Sword bombers, getting into the small spaces no one else

  could get into and riveting. And their selling job went on too, as Sal

  showed up again and again in company promotions, in the newsreels,

  in Horse Offen’s stories, wearing her bandanna and miniature over-

  alls. Al stayed just as mad as ever, midget mad—well, he was one of

  those angry midgets she knew so well, he had a right, she paid no

  attention. When Van Damme built this plant in the middle of nowhere

  (Al’s characterization) and started on the B-30 there seemed at first no

  need for midgets, the whole plane was open from end to end and no

  space too small for a normal-size worker. But they accepted Sal and Al

  anyway when they applied to go out to the new plant, which Sal

  thought was white of them; Al just snorted.

  “Well,” she said to Pancho, though not for him alone to hear, “I

  guess happiness is overrated. Not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “I’m no Utopian,” Pancho said. “I would never say so. I am a modest

  fellow. I know better than to demand too much of this world. Noth-

  ing’s perfect. You try to build the best world, the best society you can.

  I am not a u topian but a best opian.”

  All this time the moon had been rising into the cloudless air over

  Henryville, nearly full and melon-shaped, huge and gold and then

  whiter and smaller as it climbed. The sounds of the banjo, the radio

  music, and the people’s voices moved with the sluggish air block to

  block and reached into the bedroom where Prosper Olander sat on the

  edge of Connie Wrobleski’s bed with a Lucky Lager of her husband’s

  growing warm in his hand. He was listening to Connie, who was tell-

  ing her story, which was in a way the story of how she happened to be

  here in bed with Prosper. She’d stop often to say things like Oh jeez I

  don’t know or I never expected this, that meant she was giving up

  trying to explain herself, and at the same time keeping the door open

  to going on, which in time after a sigh she did, only to stop again to

  question herself or the world or Fate. Prosper listened—he did listen,

  because what she had to say was new to him, the part that was proving

  hard for her to say, and he liked her and wanted to know what she

  thought—but always as he sat his eyes went to the pair of new crutches

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 11

  now propped in the corner. Boy were they something beautiful, he

  couldn’t get enough of an eyeful, they leaned together there gleaming

  new, preening, proud. They had been built at the plant just for him by

  machinists on their breaks, and they were, as far as Prosper knew, the

  only pair like them in the world: slim strong light aluminum tubes with

  hinged aluminum cuffs covered in leather to go around his forearms

  and posts for his hands to grip, clad in hard rubber. They weighed

  nothing. His poor underarms, eternally chafed from the tops of the old

  wooden ones he had used for years—the parts of himself he felt most

  sorry for, while everybody else felt sorry about his ski-jump spine and

  marionette’s legs—the skin there was healing already.

  “Oh if I don’t shut up I’m going to start crying,” Connie said. Con-

  nie’s husband was in basic training a long way away, and he’d be off to

  war most likely soon thereafter, and here was Prosper beside his wife

  in his house, in nothing but his skivvies too; but there was no doubt in

  Prosper’s mind that they two weren’t the only ones in Henryville, or

  Oklahoma, or in these States, who were in similar circumstances. It

  was the war, and the war work, and those circumstances wouldn’t last

  forever, but just on this night Prosper seemed unable to remember or

  imagine any others.

  “Don’t cry,” he said. “Don’t cry, Connie.”

  These crutches. Look at the slight dog-leg each one took in heading

  for the ground, each different for his different legs. These crutches

  were, what, they were angelic, they were spiritual in their weightless

  strength and their quick helpful patience. God bless them. His own

  invention. He tried not to show it, in the circumstances, but he couldn’t

&
nbsp; help thinking that in a lot of ways he was a lucky man.

  PART ONE

  1

  For a time after the war began, the West Coast would go dark every

  night in expectation of air attacks. Who knew, now, how far the

  Japs could reach, what damage they might be able to inflict? We

  mounted citizen patrols that went up and down and made people

  draw their shades, put out their lamps. The stores and bars along the

  boardwalks and arcades that faced the ocean had to be equipped with

  light traps, extra doors to keep the light inside. In cities all along the

  Pacific we looked up from the darkened streets and saw for the first

  time in years the stars, all unchanged. But every once in a while, star-

  tled by some report or rumor, the great searchlights of the coastal bat-

  teries—eight hundred million candlepower they said, whatever that

  could mean—would come on and stare for a time out at the empty sea.

  Then go off again.

  Van Damme Aero was already in the business of building warplanes

  before hostilities commenced, and after Pearl Harbor their West Coast

  plant was fulfilling government contracts worth millions, with more

  signed every month. A mile-square array of tethered balloons was sus-

  pended just over Van Damme Aero’s ramifying works and its workers

  like darkening thunderclouds, a summer storm perpetually hovering,

  so that from above, from the viewpoint of a reconnaissance plane or a

  bomber, the plant was effectually invisible. More than that: the sheds

  16 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  and yards and hangars not only seemed not to be there, they also

  seemed to be something, or somewhere, else: for the topsides of all

  those balloons had been painted as a landscape, soft rolling hills of

  green and yellow, with here and there a silver lakelet and the brown

  furrows of farmland, even (so they said down under it, who would

  never see it and went on rumors) the roofs of a village, spire of a church,

  red barns and a silo. A pastorale, under which round the clock the A-

  21 Sword bombers were riveted and welded and fitted with engines and

  wings, and the huge Robur cargo seaplanes were given birth to like

  monster whales. Even when the danger of an invasion of the mainland

  seemed to have passed (leaving us still jumpy and unsettled but at least

  not cowering, not always looking to the sky at the whine of every Cub

  or Jenny), every day the Van Damme Aero workers coming to work

  dove under that landscape and it was hard not to laugh about it.

  From the Van Damme shop floor where Al and Sal Mass then

  worked with a thousand others you could see, if you knew where to

  look, a bank of broad high dark windows behind which were the con-

  ference and meeting rooms of the Van Damme directors. Guests (Army

  Air Corps generals, government officials, union bosses) brought into

  that wide low-ceilinged space, to look down upon the ceaseless activity

  below—the windows faced the length of the shop, which seemed almost

  to recede into infinite working distance—could feel superb, in com-

  mand, and they would be awed as well, as they were intended to be.

  On a day in the spring of 1942 the only persons assembled up in

  there were the engineering and employment vice presidents and their

  assistants, and Henry and Julius Van Damme. On a streamlined plinth

  in the middle of the room was a model of a proposed long-range heavy

  bomber that Van Damme Aero and the rest of the air industry and the

  appropriate government agencies were trying to bring forth. Julius Van

  Damme kept his back to the model, not wanting to be influenced

  unduly by its illusory facticity, the very quality of it that kept his

  brother Henry’s eyes on it. It was canted into the air, as though in the

  process of taking a tight rising turn at full power. It wasn’t the largest

  heavier-than-air flying thing ever conceived, but it would be the largest

  built to date, if it were built, maybe excepting a few tremendous Van

  Damme cargo seaplanes on the drawing boards; anyway it wasn’t a

  tubby lumbering cargo plane but a long slim bomber, designed to inflict

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 17

  harm anywhere in the world from bases in the continental United

  States. It had been conceived even before December 1941, back when

  Britain was expected to fall and there would be no forward bases any

  closer to Germany than Goose Bay from which to run bombers. The

  plane was designated (at the moment) XB-30, the X for experimental

  or in plan. B-30 would be its model number in the complex rubric of

  the American air forces. As yet it had no name. The Model Committee

  was making a preliminary presentation of the latest mock-up and

  specs. It was somewhat dim in the huge dark-brown room, the

  brilliantly lit shop floor below giving more light than the torchères of

  the office.

  “In this configuration, six pusher twenty-six-cylinder R-400 Bee

  air-cooled radials, each to drive a seventeen-and-a-half-foot three-

  bladed propeller.” The chief of engineering made dashes at the model,

  ticking off the features, his long black pencil like a sorcerer’s wand sum-

  moning the B-30 into existence. “Wingspan’s increased now to 225 feet

  with an area of, well, just a hair over 4,000 square feet, depending.”

  “Depending on what?” Julius said, picking up a slide rule.

  “I’ll be making that clear. The wing, as you see, a certain degree of

  sweepback. Fuel tanks within the wings, here, here, each with a capac-

  ity of 21,000 gallons. Wing roots are over seven feet thick and give

  access to the engines for maintenance in flight.”

  Julius unrolled the next broad blue sheet.

  “Twin fin-and-rudder format, like our A-21 and the Boeing Domi-

  nator now in plan, though lots bigger naturally, thirty-five-foot overall

  height.” Here the engineer swallowed, as though he had told a lie, and

  his eyes swept the faces of the others, Julius’s still bent over the sheets.

  “Sixty-foot fuselage, circular cross section as you can see. Four bomb

  bays with a maximum capacity of 40,000 pounds in this bottom

  bumpout that runs nearly the length of the fuselage. Forward crew

  compartment pressurized, and also the gunners’ weapons sighting

  station compartment behind the bomb bay. A pressurized tube runs

  over the bomb bays to connect the forward crew compartment to the

  rear gunners’ compartment.”

  “How big a tube?” Henry Van Damme asked.

  “Just over two feet in diameter.”

  Henry, who was claustrophobic, shuddered.

  18 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  “Crew has a sort of wheeled truck they can slide on to go from one

  end to the other,” said the engineer.

  For a while they gazed at it, the paper version and the model still

  climbing. The dome of the forward crew compartment, pierced with a

  multitude of Plexiglas panels, swelled from the slim body of the fuse-

  lage like a mushroom cap from its stem but smoothed away under-

  neath. A snake’s head, a.

  “I hate the pusher engines,” Henry said. “They make the ship look

  dumb.”

  “They�
��re necessary to get the damn thing off the ground,” Julius

  said, turning back to the specs unrolled before him. “Just that little bit

  more lift.”

  “I know why they’re necessary,” Henry said. “I just think necessary

  should be elegant as well, and if it’s not it means trouble later.”

  Julius, without nameable expression, raised his eyes from the rolls

  of specs to his brother.

  “Might mean trouble later,” Henry said to him. “Possible trouble.

  Often does.”

  “Oh I don’t know,” Julius said. He sat back in his chair and felt for

  the pipe in his vest pocket. “I remember Ader’s Avion back a long time

  ago. That day at Satory. How elegant that was.”

  “Yes,” Henry said. “The Avion.”

  “Piss elegant,” said Julius. His lack of expression had not altered.

  To the chief of engineering he said, “The Avion looked like a bat.

  Exquisite. Even folded its wings back like one, to rest.” Julius made the

  gesture. “Only trouble, it couldn’t fly.”

  “Well I hate to tell you what this one looks like,” Henry said.

  Julius turned then from the specs and gazed, deadpan, at the absurdly

  elongated fuselage, with its swollen head and the two big ovals at its

  root.

  2

  The day that Henry Van Damme and his brother had spoken of was

  a day when Henry was twelve and Julius ten, a day in October of

  1897, when following their tutor and their mother, young and

  beautifully dressed and soon to die, they came out of the Gare

  du Nord in Paris and got into a taxicab to be driven to a brand-new

  hotel in the Rue St.-Philippe-du-Ruel (their father liked new hotels, as

  he did motor cars and telephones). Waiting for them at the desk, as

  they had hoped and expected, was a large stiff envelope, and the boys

  insisted that their tutor immediately set up the gramophone that went

  everywhere with them in its own leather box. Their mother had diffi-

  culty even getting them out of their wool coats and hats before they sat

  down in front of the machine. Jules was the one who cranked it up

  with the slender Z-shaped crank of lacquered steel and ebony; Henry

  (whose name was Hendryk in the Old World) was the one who slit the

  seals of the envelope and drew out carefully the Berliner disc of cloudy

  zinc. He knew he was not to touch the grooves of its surface but it