Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  money values and venereal disease the idea’s laughable. But yes. In a

  society correctly made, where human feelings and passions and needs

  are understood and met, not repressed or denied or despised, yes. Free

  love; mutuality; everyone a suitor to many; many loves for each one. A

  Passionate Series in harmony. Old, young, everyone. The old in our

  society suffer a loneliness that can hardly be imagined, because they

  are cast out of the possibility of the love relation.”

  “Everybody just going at it, then? Grandpa, Grandma, the kids?”

  Prosper tried not to grin disrespectfully.

  “Not at all,” said Pancho. “Not in a harmonious society, such as

  you, my boy, have never experienced and perhaps cannot conceive,

  which causes you to laugh at these possibilities. Of course even in the

  Harmonious City to come, some will be satisfied with a brute con-

  nection, and will find many who are like spirited, if they are allowed.

  Some are naturally satisfied only with a lifetime devotion. Others

  not; they enjoy intrigue, titillation, variety—they are like gourmets to

  the plain dinner-eaters.” He sopped bread in his gravy. “Then there

  are those whose spirits are the part that is most invested, who care

  less for the physical, though no love relation is without the physical.

  And so on.”

  “Sounds complicated,” Prosper said.

  “The complicated is always the true,” Pancho said. “The simple is

  false and a lie.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Prosper said.

  When their Salisbury steaks were done and the greasy paper nap-

  kins balled and tossed on the plates, Pancho said he’d retire, but Pros-

  per decided to sit a while, have another drink, see if something

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  happened, he couldn’t say what. The bandstand remained empty, and

  the few folks who arrived to take the tables or occupy the bar—a

  couple of men in uniform among them—seemed to be fruitlessly await-

  ing the same thing, whatever it was—intrigue, maybe, titillation—and

  after a time Prosper went back across the courts to his room.

  Pancho lay in his bed, pajamas buttoned up to the neck, his gray

  hair upshot, reading from a small leather-bound book, a Testament

  Prosper supposed.

  “No,” Pancho said. “A poem, in the form of a play, by Percy Shel-

  ley. Prometheus Unbound. Though it has served me in some ways as a

  scripture.”

  “Oh,” Prosper said. He got out of his jacket, rummaged in his knap-

  sack to find his toothbrush and tooth powder, and went into the bath-

  room; brushed his teeth, washed his face with a dingy cloth, and made

  water, propping himself on one crutch. He flushed, and looked into the

  damp-smelling shower stall, hung with a rubberized curtain. To use it

  he’d have to turn it on standing, then sit to take his braces off while it

  ran, then hump on his bottom over the lip and under the stream. If the

  water changed temperature meantime, he was out of luck. Don’t forget

  the soap: if he left it in its wire basket above, he wouldn’t be able to

  reach it once he was in.

  Maybe tomorrow.

  He returned to his bed and sat. From now on, wherever he went, he

  would have to lay plans for himself, and think of everything. He hadn’t

  seen that clearly till now.

  Pancho kept his eyes on his book while Prosper removed his pants,

  unstrapped each of his braces in turn and with his hands pulled his legs

  free. He laid the braces on the floor and managed to pull down the

  coverlet and sheet and put himself within.

  “Good night, my friend,” Pancho said then, and closed his book.

  “Good night.”

  Pancho pulled the chain of the lamp. He lay back against the pillow,

  arms alongside him, gray hair upright, palms down; Prosper would

  find him just that way in the morning.

  Prosper lay awake in the light passing from outside through the

  drawn shade and the calico. He tried to imagine all the things that he

  would have to be prepared to do, to put up with, to get around or over.

  50 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  He tried to feel sure that they would each be accomplished or avoided

  somehow, even though he would have to face them alone, without

  Elaine. That would make up for Elaine’s skipping out on him at the El,

  and going on without him. She had urged him that far, she had made

  him be that brave, but she’d been unable to believe in him any further,

  and left him there at the bottom of the stairway. But when he found her

  again he’d show her that he had done it. When he found her, out there

  by the sea in the sun where she’d gone and he was headed, he would be

  able to tell her See? I’m here, I made it, alone. You didn’t think I could

  but I did. She’d be sorry and amazed. And he’d say It’s all right: it’s all

  right now.

  In the late afternoon of the next day they reached the city where Pancho’s

  fabrics company had offices. Looking somehow determined and stricken

  at the same time, Pancho left Prosper in the double-parked car, pulled

  out his sample cases from the trunk, and disappeared into a closed-

  faced building; reappeared an hour later without them. Prosper had

  fended off a traffic cop by showing his crutches, claiming his driver’d be

  out any minute. Pancho started the car and drove for a time without

  speaking. Then he said:

  “Prosper, not one thing written in all the books of philosophy or

  morals over the last three thousand years has made one damn bit of

  difference to human beings, or added one jot to human happiness.

  They say what should be: not what is. I’ve learned more about the cor-

  ruptions of the human spirit in that office, in that business, where for

  thirty years and more I was robbed and hoodwinked and taken, than I

  could have in any book. More about human nature in a smoking car.

  More about the frustrations of desire in a boardinghouse. Don’t talk to

  me about philosophy.”

  Prosper didn’t. They checked in that night at a downtown hotel,

  one supplied with all those things Pancho had said motels didn’t have,

  plus a barbershop and a shoeshine stand. As Pancho had his shock of

  straw-stiff hair cut, sighing at the barber’s worn wisecracks, Prosper

  read magazines. Here was one on whose cover a young woman mod-

  eled a uniform that an airplane company was issuing to all its women

  employees. Inside, the article was titled “Working Chic to Chic” and

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  showed the same young woman in various situations, wearing the new

  outfit, which satisfied all the requirements of the job but could be worn

  anywhere. It was a deep blue (the article said blue), a pair of high-

  waisted slacks and a tunic the same color, with company badges on the

  shoulder and the breast pocket. All you had to do was swap the tunic

  for a nice blouse or sweater and you were dressed for a date or a dance.

  There were pictures of the young woman in full uniform on the wing

  of a plane, gazing into the clouds; then holding an electric tool of some

  kind; then, tunic-less, lau
ghing at a bar, holding a drink, the same

  slacks, and two—maybe three—servicemen around her for her to

  ignore. The girl’s name was Norma Jeane.

  Prosper closed the magazine. Norma Jeane on the cover stood with

  her back to the camera, hand on her hip and her head turned back to

  smile at Prosper, like Betty Grable in that picture. No girdle for her.

  “So get this,” the barber said.

  Prosper sought out the article again, flipping the big pages, unable

  to locate it, pages filled with tanks and planes and advancing and

  retreating armies, generals and statesmen, the united nations. Here.

  Norma Jeane. He envied her; envied her soldiers, her smile. Many

  suitors for each one. The plant where she worked building airplanes

  with her tools was in Oklahoma. Van Damme Aero’s brand-new plant

  for the making of their huge new bombers, using the most modern and

  up-to-date methods and materials. A workers’ paradise, it’s said, and

  workers are pouring in from all parts of the country to sign up for the

  thousands of jobs. Skilled and unskilled. Old and young.

  Oklahoma. If he remembered his geography right they would pass

  through there on their way to the Coast. They had to.

  “Say,” he said, looking up, spoiling the barber’s punch line. “I’ve an

  idea.”

  5

  We weren’t where we were in those times because we had been

  thrown or removed to there. We didn’t think so. We felt we

  had impelled ourselves, like the faring pioneers and immi-

  grants driving their wagons or pushing their barrows who

  somewhere somehow along the way stopped and settled as a bird does

  on a branch or a catarrh does on the lungs: those pioneers whose

  grandchildren we were, now again pulling up stakes, uprooted in the

  mobilization, the putting-into-motion, that began before the real war

  did and continued all through it. True, in some places we stayed on

  where our fathers and mothers and grandfathers had first settled, but

  even so we were caught up in that motion if our parents and grandpar-

  ents had happened to settle in places that those on the move were now

  headed for or drawn to—seemingly blown to, you might think seeing

  them, as by one of those comic tornadoes that lift a boy on a bicycle or

  a chicken coop full of chickens or a Ford car with Gramps and Gram

  inside and set it down unharmed somewhere else. Those stories always

  made the papers, and the new migrant herds did too, arriving purpose-

  fully, getting off trains carrying their bags and kids, pulling into town

  in panting jalopies with bald tires, looking around for a place to stay.

  Alarming, sometimes, to those already there and living in the homes

  and going to the churches and the shops they thought were theirs.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 53

  Those trains go both ways the locals would now and then say to new-

  comers whose ways they didn’t like. People from elsewhere were more

  different from you than they are now. They came from farther away.

  Pancho Notzing with Prosper beside him reached Ponca City the

  next afternoon and they were immediately caught up in the stream of

  traffic headed out of the city—every Ponca spare room, hotel bed,

  guesthouse, and shed held a worker or two that hadn’t got accommo-

  dation in the dormitories or houses of Henryville, and the second shift

  was about to begin. Yellow Van Damme buses, yellow bicycles that

  Van Damme loaned out free to workers, cars of every description all

  going out along roads not meant for much traffic beyond a leisurely

  touring car going one way and a hay wagon going the other: tempers

  could get frayed, including those of the folks on their porches by the

  roadside watching.

  Getting a job at Van Damme Aero Ponca City was like being drafted

  by a tornado. A hundred people were involved in nothing but looking

  you over, asking you questions, filling your hands with forms, examin-

  ing you, putting you through tests, chivying crowds from one station

  to another in a wide circle (though you couldn’t see a circle) until you

  reached where you’d started from, but now with all you needed to be

  an employee. Now and then as you were blown around you heard vast

  noises outside the processing center, the big Bee engines starting up,

  horns sounding, wide steel doors rolling open—that’s all it was, but

  you didn’t know that and jumped a little each time. They sorted you

  into shifts, sent some home to come back the next morning or mid-

  night to begin, and some they simply put to work—especially the

  skilled men, who’d arrived dressed for it, and not in a suit and a pair of

  wingtips or a frock and stacked heels, and who had their own tools in

  sturdy cases. If you wanted that Van Damme Aero uniform for work,

  and they suggested it would be a very good thing, you got a ticket for

  one and could pay it off out of your first pay envelope, or take a little

  out for three weeks or four. There wasn’t a stair in the place: Van

  Damme wanted every space accessible to the fleet of electric trucks that

  scooted everywhere, pulling trailer-loads of materials, running

  unguessable errands, tooting their little horns and flicking their lights.

  Pancho and Prosper were immediately drawn apart, stepping into two

  different intake lanes and swept inward in different directions. Prosper

  54 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  kept up with the crowd, though he spent longer in Physical Examina-

  tions than most, and at the end he got a time card, and instructions,

  and a form to fill out to get a badge.

  Prosper Olander had a war job. He started on the first shift, next

  morning.

  Pancho Notzing, also taken on, was looking pale and somewhat

  asweat when Prosper found him by the car in the parking lot.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” the older man said. “I would like to

  be able to refuse.”

  “It seems good to me,” Prosper said. His shirt was damp at the

  arms from all the walking. “Are you antiwar?”

  “Well not in the usual sense maybe,” Pancho said. “I regret the stupid

  waste. No one would go to war if their lives were gratifying, if their

  associations gave them satisfaction, if they had pleasure and delight.

  They go because they can’t think why they shouldn’t. Their leaders are

  filled with rage and envy and fear, and no one laughs them down.”

  “You have to defend yourself.”

  “Ah yes. Well. Perhaps. In defending ourselves we may also change

  ourselves, without seeing that we do, and for good too. These vast

  engines of destruction. The vast System that’s needed to build them

  and send them on their way. We don’t know the outcome.”

  He said it as though he did know the outcome, and Prosper—not

  only to forestall him from saying so—said, “Let’s get some dinner.

  Speaking of pleasure.”

  They went back to Ponca, looking at a night spent in the car, as

  there were very likely going to be no rooms for miles around. A square

  meal at least they ought to be able to get, they thought, and they had to

  wait long enough for that, standing listeni
ng to the chat on the line

  outside the Chicken in the Rough on Grand Avenue (animated neon

  sign over the door whereon an enraged rooster took a swing at a golf

  ball, and was next shown with a busted club, and then again).

  “Dance lessons?” they heard one man ask another in some surprise.

  “Thursdays. Tuesdays I got bowling, Mondays the checkers tourna-

  ment.”

  “Mondays the Moths play the Hep Cats. First game of the season.

  They say Henry Van Damme’s throwing out the first ball.”

  Once inside they had a further wait at the counter, Ponca City’s

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 55

  longtime dry laws modified to allow mild beer for the duration, and

  glasses and steins crowding the length of it. Prosper worked in beside a

  tall person in the Van Damme uniform, minus the tunic with badge

  and name, the blue slacks and a shirt just fine for off-hours, as prom-

  ised. Not Norma Jeane. Two blue barrettes held back her black hair,

  done in a Sculpture Wave he guessed, though maybe it was natural. A

  very tall person. She took no notice of him, looking down the bar away,

  but (Prosper thought) at no one in particular.

  “Mind if I smoke?” he asked her.

  “I don’t care if you burn.” She turned slightly toward him to let him

  see her uncaring face, and she noticed the crutches under his arms.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  He offered her a smoke, which she declined. “You work at Van

  Damme?” he asked. The woman looked at him with kindly contempt,

  who doesn’t, what a dumb line.

  “I just got hired,” Prosper said.

  “Is that so.”

  “Doing something I’ve never done.”

  “Yeah well. They have their own ideas. I was a welder when I came,

  but no more.”

  Prosper saw Pancho waving to him, he’d secured a couple of seats.

  “Care to join us?” he asked the woman, and as all his remarks so

  far had done, this one seemed to rebound gently from her without

  making contact. He straightened carefully and stepped away with what

  he hoped was a certain grace. As he went to where Pancho waited he

  heard laughter behind him, but not, he thought, at him.

  Baskets of fried chicken, laid on calico paper as though for a picnic,

  and French-fried potatoes; paper napkins and the bottled “3.2” beer.

  Pancho looked down at this insufficiency. One of his beliefs was that if all