Four Freedoms
Page 12
than she ever had after any day’s work on the ranch: the pavement harder
on her feet and legs than any hardpan; the constant draw of thousands
of faces passing you on the street, the constant need to look away from
them if they caught your eye, just as they looked away too; the air filled
with sounds to be listened to, radios blaring from stores, car horns urgent
but mostly meaningless, gunshot backfires, police whistles, sirens
announcing disasters that maybe she should run from but couldn’t see
(for the first time she became keenly aware that you can shut your eyes
but you can’t shut your ears). And there were no rooms at the Y.
“Nothing? I’ve walked a long way. I’ve got a job, starting tomor-
row.”
“I’m so sorry,” the woman at the desk said, and she seemed to mean
it; she was no older than Vi, and badly frazzled. “I can put you on our
list. I mean people come and go so fast here, you know, they get more
permanent places, I’m sure there’ll be something soon.”
“Well,” Vi said, not turning away, hoping she’d somehow be taken
on as a desperate case and her problem solved, even when the frazzled
woman moved off to busy herself with other things and avoid Vi’s eyes.
Vi looked around. Something calming and bounteous about the place,
a couple of oil portraits, old lady benefactors Vi guessed, the wicker
furniture and the bookshelves. They had a gymnasium, just for the
women! Vi thought she could live here forever. But she couldn’t just
hangdog it here in front of the desk, it wasn’t going to work.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 87
Turning to look for a solution she saw a woman seated in the lobby
regarding her intently, who then raised two fingers to summon her. Vi,
with a glance at the receptionist’s back, went to where the woman sat,
a pretty plump brunette Vi’s age.
“I know you need a place,” she said to Vi in a hurried undertone.
“Look, you can stay in my spot. I work the late shift, and you can have
the bed till I get back.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. They don’t like us doing that, though, so you know, mum’s
the word.”
Closer to her now, Vi saw that the girl’s eyebrows were carefully
plucked and redrawn, like a movie star’s, and her makeup done with
care.
“Okay?” she said.
“Oh. Yes,” Vi said. “Yes, sure, thanks so much. My name’s
Violet.”
“Terry,” said the girl, and held out a hand, limply ladylike, but the
nails short and what seemed to be small burns on thumb and knuckle.
“It’s 302 upstairs. Just go around and down to the gym, then up the
back stairs from there.”
“Okay.”
“See you in a bit. They won’t mind if you rest here. Read a maga-
zine, something.”
“Okay.”
She was gone. Vi watched the seams on her stockings flash: where’d
she get those? Then carelessly she drifted through the lobby, picked up
a paper, sat down out of sight of the desk. Women came and went, yak-
king and laughing and calling to one another, some in work clothes
and boots or saddle shoes, some in dresses and hats, some toting lunch
pails or toolboxes. After a while she got up and followed the sign down
to the overheated gym, which was empty except for a couple of large
women on stationary bicycles; Vi could hear the echoey splash of the
pool and smell chlorine. Then up the narrow back stairs to knock at
the door of 302.
The room was tiny, a narrow bed, a little dresser with a mirror, a
white curtain in a window that looked out at nothing. Terry was redo-
ing her makeup, getting ready to go, she said. She did her lips with a
88 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
dark lipstick, not the stick itself but a brush she wiped across the
obscene little red tip poking from the cartridge. Vi asked her what
work she did.
“Welding,” she said. She named the shipyard, famous for its speed,
a great tycoon had streamlined the works, they called him Sir Launch-
alot in the papers. Terry plucked a sheet out of a box of Lucky tissues
and pressed her lips on it. “Where you going?”
Vi took from her bag the form she’d been given and read the name.
“Hey, that one’s out on the island,” Terry said into the tiny mirror.
“You’ll have to take the ferry out.”
“That’s what they said,” Vi said.
“Why’d you pick that one?”
“Well,” Vi said, feeling Shirley in the room too, wondering too, “I
guess because they said they have a softball league. I thought I could
play.”
Terry looked at her without judgment but conveying clearly that Vi
was a greenhorn and didn’t know the basics. “They all have softball
leagues,” she said. “And bowling leagues and glee clubs and theatri-
cals. Anything you want. Anything to make you happy.”
Vi said nothing, afraid that if she asked further she’d find out she’d
made a dumb mistake.
“You play softball?” Terry said kindly. “You like it?”
“Yes.” Vi decided to make the claim for herself, not be shy. “I played
on a good team in high school. WPA built the town a diamond and
stands. We were all-state, 1935. I played at normal school too for one
year.”
“Well.” Terry looked at her and nodded, smiling, as though a child
had told her of some little accomplishment. “Real teams.”
“My brothers were stars. Baseball. It was all they cared about. They
taught me. I’m good.” She tried to say it plainly, as though she’d said
I’m tall. “Anyway it would be fun to play. I thought.”
“Sure,” Terry said, popping her lipstick into an alligator bag. “Let
me tell you how you get out there tomorrow, okay?”
How many stories she had read of people on journeys—there was
Kidnapped and there was Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio and so
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 89
many more—and in them the one who’s on the journey meets persons,
one after the other, who either help or hurt him—sometimes seeming
to offer help but then turning on him, sometimes gruff or rejecting but
then kind underneath. Some of them seem to know a secret about the
traveler, or to want something from him. That’s how the story pro-
ceeds: sometimes going from bad to good, sometimes bad to worse
before becoming good again. Her journey wasn’t turning out like that,
not that she’d expected it to. Everybody was pretty kind but mostly
preoccupied; you asked them for what you needed and sometimes they
could give it but mostly not and they passed out of your attention and
you went on. It didn’t pile up the way it did in books: it was come and
go, over and gone.
But Shirley stayed in her consciousness, speaking and questioning
and a little doubtful, or surprised and admiring; and Terry too, her
makeup and her burns. And then the three women in black leather at
the ferry’s rail.
She’d been early at the dock, making for the streetcar with the
others, standing on the open platform
and clinging on, thinking in a
kind of euphoric fear that at any minute she’d be knocked off and
tumble down the impossibly steep hill that the little car trundled over,
bell clanging. The air was rich and cold and watery, nothing she’d seen
or smelled before, clouds of pale birds—gulls!—descending and aris-
ing from the sea-edge where she got off. After the crisp brassy trolley
bell the deep imperious horns, hurry up, she was carried along under
the noses of high black ships being loaded by sky-flown cranes, and
through the gate and onto the little ferryboat, cars creeping in three
lines into its belly and people crowding the decks. Then out onto the
sea, or the bay at least, black heaving water and the insubstantial city
seeming to float away behind. Vi held tight, as though she might float
away too. She saw three women, chums apparently, laughing together,
one leaning on the rail on her elbows and looking down, one beside her
hands in her pockets. The three were all dressed alike, in jackets and
trousers of what could only be black leather, heavy as hides, collars up
against the smart breeze, and high boots laced with a yard of thong.
Their hair was covered, except for one’s blond forelock escaping, in
bright bandannas knotted at the front. And on the back of each jacket
was sewn or stuck a big red V in shiny cloth, their own idea obviously.
90 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
People turned to look at them, intrigued or cheered or a little shocked,
but they didn’t notice, used to it maybe. Vi had always thought of her-
self as brave—her pa said so, her teacher, but she knew it anyway—but
she’d always thought of brave as something you did alone: being alone
in what you did and doing it anyway was what was meant by being
brave. Only when she saw those three (and she couldn’t have said it
then, couldn’t until she’d thought about it, had seen them often in her
mind, their open faces, joshing one another or looking out over water)
did she know that there could be a way of being brave together, a few
together.
The first thing she’d have to do, they told her and her class of new
hires, would be to get some good strong boots. Shipyards are just dan-
gerous places. Dungarees are good but in some jobs you’d be better off
with a pair of welder’s leathers. You’ll pay for those yourself; you might
go down to the Army-Navy store, they’ve got the stuff. You’ll have a
locker and you can keep your work clothes here if you don’t want to
wear them in the street, lot of girls don’t (Vi thought of Terry, brave
too). Now come along and we’ll start you with some basic training.
So she became an arc welder, stitching precut forms together to make
bulkhead walls and then other parts of ships (“it’s a lot like doing
embroidery,” their trainer said, as he obviously had said many times to
women before, but Vi’d never done embroidery so it was no help to
her), and on the Swing Shift she and others would pick up their rod
pot, stinger, wire brush for washing off the slag and getting that per-
fect bead, and the long lead for hooking up to power, looped over your
shoulder: watch out for somebody cutting into your lead, detaching
you at the middle and hooking themselves in, hey what the hell! Sixty
feet overhead the crane car ran on its tracks, the huge steel plates sus-
pended from it that were chunked in place with that vast noise, the
welders lowering their masks and moving in. Vi wore her ranch over-
alls and a sweatshirt of her brother’s, didn’t buy leathers for a while,
feeling somehow she had to earn them, like a varsity sweater or a jock-
ey’s silks; but the sparks from a carbon arc off a steel plate could burn
badly, right through your brassiere—Terry, shaking her head, gave Vi
cream for the burns.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 91
Off-hours she looked for a room, but it was tight. You couldn’t just
get a room in some cheap portside hotel, it looked bad, a girl in a flop-
house, but sometimes when she found a house with a sign in the
window, room for rent, she’d be told it was taken already, only to
find out later that some man had come after her and got it, tough luck
sweetheart. After a week of sneaking into Terry’s room at the Y she got
lucky, the union found her a room to share in an old mansion down-
town that had been swept into a bad neighborhood in the Depression
and never recovered, cut up into small rooms sharing the vast marbled
baths, a dusty ballroom on the third floor where the women danced
and got in trouble. Her new roommate had been sharing with her sister,
but her sister’s husband had been invalided out and she’d gone home to
care for him. She’d left behind her gloves, Vi’s now if she wanted them,
her good lunch box, and an Indian motorcycle, an ancient one-lunger
on which the two of them had got to the docks each day, now to be Sis
and Vi’s transportation, each of them in their welding gear and black
turbans, Vi up behind so tall she could see over the driver’s head: roll-
ing onto that ferry where she’d first seen that trio with the V-sign on
their backs, herself one of them now.
Pretty soon she started playing ball.
8
After the first tryouts Dad said to her: “You’ve played some.”
“Some.”
“Okay. You want to pitch.”
“If I can.”
He smiled. “You can,” he said, “if you can. You certainly may.”
Hearing that the man who’d be coaching her team (and a couple of
others too) was called Dad, she’d expected a grizzled codger, tobacco
chewer, old-timer. Dad wasn’t old; he was an engineer, with a wife and
kids, doing necessary war work. The ball teams were his relaxation. He
spoke little and smiled less, and Vi had to keep herself from staring at
him, trying to figure him out. She’d find out later that he’d noticed that.
Everyone who signed up to play was sorted randomly into the four
women’s teams the shipyard fielded—the Rinky-dinks, the Steel Ladies,
the Stingers, the Bobtails. Just about anybody was allowed to play, but
a rough order was apparent, and if you were better than the team you
were put in, Dad pushed you into a different position on another one,
where maybe you wouldn’t look good for a while, so nobody’d feel
jealous, and then he’d give you the position you could really play, and
the team would rise in the standings.
They played not out on the island where the shipyard was, but at a
little ballpark on the mainland, three diamonds laid out regulation
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 93
softball style, where there was a constant rotation as shifts began and
ended, some teams practicing, others playing. They played each other,
they played teams from the other shipyards and war plants, they played
the WAVEs from the base, they played a team from the government
offices and one from the port authority. Vi was amazed at how seri-
ously most people took it, as seriously as they took their jobs. The
Stingers (her team) had uniforms, baggy and gray but uniforms,
and
Dad wouldn’t allow you to play in a game if you weren’t suited up—
sometimes Vi heading for a game straight from her rooming house had
to wear hers on the trolley out to the field, and back again sweaty and
bedraggled and feeling foolish. The whole of downtown was no larger
than a ranch, but getting around in it took forever, trolleys and buses
and on feet weary from a day’s work. It was hard, and the game the
women played was played more fiercely than Vi had ever played it, no
kindness in it, no forgiveness for errors, no encouragement yelled out
by the other team just to be nice. She loved it that way. It was great to
learn you could weld, learn you could drive a crane a hundred feet over
the shop floor, or run a drill press as big as a double bed, but playing
real ball was even better. Vi thought so.
She’d never really had a coach before, but she could tell Dad was
hardest on the players he thought were the best; they were all playing
just for fun, supposedly, but Dad played to win as if it weren’t. He caught
Vi out for being lackadaisical, for letting runners steal bases because she
didn’t check, for smiling, for giving away her pitch in the way she stood,
the way she composed her face—he said she looked one way when she
threw a fastball and a different way for a curve. She didn’t believe him,
or didn’t believe it could matter, and laughed, but his face was stony.
“Softball’s a game of thinking,” he said. “You gotta think, Vi.
Because the ball goes so slow, and can’t go far. They say baseball’s a
game of thinking too, but then along comes Ruth or Williams and it
turns out it’s a game of muscle after all. But softball’s a thinking game
all the time. And the pitcher’s the player that’s thinking the game.”
“I think.”
“You think too much. When you think. I can read you like a book.”
He made her pitch to him, hitting pitch after pitch, lightly laying
them out behind her, to right field, left field. The harder she tried the
easier it seemed for him to do it.
94 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Come on, girl. Fool me. Trip me up, take me out. What are you
waiting for?”
Dad could make her want to cry, but he could also make her refuse
to cry: she looked back at him, her eyes slits like his, gum clenched in
her jaw. Her arm ached. She threw as hard as she could until at last she