Four Freedoms
Page 13
decided she hated him so much she didn’t care what he thought of her,
stared fiercely at him and wound up and threw a lazy slider that he
whiffed. The catcher missed it too.
“Practice over,” Dad said calmly.
Night had fallen suddenly. She, the stolid little catcher, and Dad were
the last players left. Vi was faced with a walk to the trolley and a long
ride back to the mansion. Dad put them both in his Dodge coupe.
“It’s out of your way,” Vi said.
“You don’t know what’s out of my way.”
He drove the old car top down, shifting with a sort of beautiful cau-
tion to save both transmission and rubber: they went on without speak-
ing, though Dad once looked over to Vi, conscious that she was
watching him, and smiled. He dropped off the catcher at her house on
the hill and took Vi down toward the harbor, though even Vi could tell
the other order would have been quicker.
“I’ve got to send you home,” she said at the door of her place. “House
rules.” At which he slowly nodded, knowing from the way she put it
(she knew he knew) that she wouldn’t if she didn’t have to; and halfway
down the block he turned the Dodge around and came back, and she
was still standing there on the doorstep just as though she’d known he’d
do that, though really she hadn’t, had simply stopped in midspace await-
ing something—the same thoughtless mindless not-expectant awaiting
(she’d think later) as before a kiss. They went up the stairs and she left
him in the alcove and knocked at her own door. Sis answered, she was
just dressing to go out because tonight the picture changed at the Fox,
and Vi said Okay and waved her good-bye, at which Sis closed the door
slowly and in some puzzlement. Vi took Dad’s hand and together they
went up to that ballroom on the third floor, the parquet and the spooky
peeling gold wallpaper illuminated by the streetlights coming on. Vi
wound the gramophone and put on whatever record was on the top of
the pile, just the right one of course, because by now it was evident that
this was one of those times when nothing could go wrong, even things
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 95
going wrong would be funny and sweet and right. It didn’t surprise her
that Dad was one of those men who can dance as well as they play ball,
or swim, or drive a car. After a while they knew that Sis had gone to the
movies and they went downstairs.
They left the lights off but this room too was lit by the streetlights,
the city never dark, not the way home had been. She wept a little, and
wouldn’t say why; Dad thought he knew why but he was wrong. It was
the dark V of his throat and his burned forearms in the dimness, the
long white body and its stain or smudge of black hair from breastbone
down to where his penis rose: reminding her of someone else, back
where she came from, and all that had happened between them there,
which seemed now not only far away but long ago.
“So he taught you more than ball,” Prosper said to Vi in Ponca City.
“He didn’t teach me how to play ball. I knew.”
“Well I mean.”
“Yes.”
“And he was the first man you’d been with?”
“No,” Vi said. “No, actually, Prosper, he wasn’t.”
“Ah well then who—”
“Never mind,” Vi explained.
It was practice the day of a game with the Bomberettes from the air-
craft plant, and—Vi afterward couldn’t actually remember the sequence
of events, and had to believe Dad when he told her how it happened—
the second baseman, trying to catch a runner headed for the plate,
beaned Vi square in the back of the head.
The second baseman was being comforted—she felt terrible—when
Vi came around. Dad had brought her a Coke bottle full of water from
the bubbler at the edge of the field. While she sipped, he felt within her
heavy hair for the bump beginning to grow. “She’s okay,” he said. “Just
give her room.”
They all stood around.
“All right,” Dad said, that way he had, it made you jump: they went
back to the field.
“You’re okay,” he said to Vi. “You can pitch today.”
It took Vi a while to respond. “Oh?”
96 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Sure.”
“And what if I’d rather stay in bed with a bottle of aspirin.”
“No no,” said Dad. “We need you. We need to win this one.”
“And why so.” She had a hard time hearing herself speak.
“Well,” he said after some thought, “one reason, there’s a lot of
money riding on tonight.”
She thought he’d said “a lot of muddy riding” and tried to make sense
of that, an image from the ranch forming in her mind. “What?” she said.
“A lot of money,” he said. “We’re doped to win. The smart bettors
have been watching you. I mean you particularly. The book is still
giving odds against us, though, and they want to get in on this before
the odds change.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” said Vi. She usually never
used a bad word, except around her brothers. Times change. Dad sat
down beside her, the bottle of water in his hands, and gave her a sip
now and then as he explained.
There had never been a time like that for gambling: so much money
flowing into our pockets, so little to spend it on. The horses and dogs
got record purses, and an average Sunday bettor was dropping a hun-
dred dollars at the races, but the trouble was getting to the track—we
weren’t supposed to be wasting gas traveling for amusement, and it was
said that War Resources Board agents were coming to the parking lots
and conning the license plates for cars from far away, issuing warnings,
maybe even canceling your precious B sticker so you’d stay home.
There were the endless poker games too, their pots growing, the
amount won every wild night exactly matching the amount lost, a
continuous float moving from back room to dormitory to rooming house
to basement around the war plants. We’d bet on checkers tournaments,
on ladies’ pedestrian races (a dozen dames wig-wagging along heel-and-
toe toward the tape like a flock of geese), on donkey basketball. Of
course there were bookies, it was the golden age of vigorish, their multiple
phone lines ringing one after the other (one bookie’s operation had
twenty phones crowded on a desk, a sort of homemade PBX with all the
receivers dangling from a wall of hooks). They made book on the remains
of major league baseball, where you couldn’t see DiMaggio or Williams,
who were fighting the war, but there was Stan “the Man” Musial, for
some reason exempt, and there was Pete Gray of the Browns, who had
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 97
one arm, master of the drag bunt, no surprise; the Yankees brought back
smiling old-timers like Snuffy Stirnweiss and Spurgeon “Spud” Chandler,
who doffed their caps to the ironically cheering crowds. There was the
women’s pro ball league, founded by a chewing gum magnate, playing
what was actually softba
ll at the beginning. And there were the leagues
of the war plants, an East Coast, a Middle, a West Coast, playing for
free, their standings known only to the unions and companies that
sponsored them and to the ferrets of the betting book that laid the odds,
which went unmentioned in the Green Sheet; you had to read the plant
news releases and the back pages of small-town papers, better you had
to have seen a team play, aircraft plant against Liberty Ship builder,
welders against riveters, Bay City Bees versus Boilermakers Lodge 72
Sledges, the roster changing every week as workers were hired or quit or
were drafted. It was the women’s teams that were the ones that were
followed, oddsmakers discovering a new science in judging the tenacity,
speed, spirit of coeds and housewives and waitresses.
It had to be hush-hush or the bosses and the government would start
wondering what this had to do with winning the war, but that only
made it more attractive, a secret Rube Goldberg machine you put money
into at one end and it came out double at the other or disappeared
entirely. Like any honorable sportsmen, the coaches and managers
wouldn’t bet, and neither would the players—mostly—but the unions
and the industries wanted their teams to win: all the gifts and the time
off they gave the best players and the little kickbacks for the coaches
hotted up the atmosphere, and staying high in the standings meant get-
ting and keeping the talent, which meant figuring how to convince a
pitcher or a first baseman to quit one plant and take a job at another.
“You’re not telling me you’ve got money on this,” Vi said to Dad.
“If I did I wouldn’t say so,” Dad said. “I’d say no.”
“Are you saying no?”
“I’m saying no.”
“So big help that is.”
“Listen,” Dad said, and he helped Vi to her feet. “I want to win. I
want to see you play with the best team I can give you. I want the shop
to be proud of the team and you, so next day they can think about how
well you did when they go in to work to make ships and send them out
to fight the war. There’s the reason. Okay?”
98 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Vi stood, feeling the world turn about her a bit, then slow, settle,
and stop. She bent to pick up her glove and the world stayed still. She
was okay. “Okay,” she said.
The Stingers won that day, beating that “point spread” that was
evolving among the West Coast bookies just at that time, a new way of
managing the rolling tide of betting money and the unknowability of
outlandish semipro and amateur teams. That was a good day, with a
special commendation from the front office read out over the loudspeak-
ers from which issued on most days the news of battles, of quotas met,
ships launched, and announcements of War Bond drives. Then with
amazing suddenness (amazing if you hadn’t lived there long enough to
witness it) the dry season ended and the rains came; every game was
washed out until they just gave up and called it a day, tossed the bats in
the musty canvas bags and pulled up the sodden bases and locked them
in the dugouts. The end. Vi and Dad and the others went back on the
line, working double shifts now and then to make up for lost time and
wages, but for the two of them also because it was easy on the Graveyard
Shift to find a place deep in the belly of a growing ship that foremen
weren’t going to wander into, one with piles of cotton wadding or insu-
lation to lie on. Reflected glow of a flashlight turned away into the dark-
ness. Echo of their noises off steel walls, walls she had maybe made
herself, how odd, but they two not the only ones to have found their way
down there, repellent litter of cigarette butts, pint bottles, used condoms,
a bulletin had had to be posted about it, Let’s Keep Our Work Spaces
Neat. Too cold anyway soon enough, always cold and damp, clouds
parting for a moment only to gather again like helpless weeping. Vi
thought she was getting athlete’s foot, not fair, since she wasn’t an ath-
lete anymore. Sis said she was getting athlete’s foot up to the knee. Vi
learned that the mere clammy difficulty of getting warm together could
kill a romance that was already chancy at best, illicit, homeless, always
needing to be arranged, willed into being. As the rains fell steadily Dad’s
six-month exemption from military service ran out. He could have got a
new exemption without difficulty, but he chose not to. It was not Vi but
his wife and kids who saw him off for basic training at the station.
A couple of months later—spring coming, blue sky visible now and
then, that smell in the air—Vi was told by the new manager of the
Stingers that she had an opportunity to go down to the Van Damme
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 99
Aero works, get a job building planes, easier work for better money.
Van Damme Aero had one of the best softball clubs in the league,
except for the pitching, which had long been weak. They were eager to
get Vi and had offered to persuade a good shortstop and one of their
top catchers—they were deep in catching—to take jobs up here in the
shipyards, if the benefits were right.
“Play all year round down there,” the manager said to Vi, though
finding it hard to look her in the eye. “Season never ends.”
So she’d gone south, and then west to Ponca when the offer came; she
played for the Van Damme teams, meeting new people. Men too. Never
anything serious. She told Prosper about one or two, dismissive, not
letting out of her locked heart the details he’d have liked to know.
“Oh well,” she’d say. “The trouble with that one was, the beginning
of the end came before the beginning.”
Prosper lifted his legs with one arm and swung them out of the bed to
put his feet on the floor, and sat up. “I know what you mean,” he said.
“Yes. ‘Love grows old, and love grows cold, and fades away like
morning dew.’ Like the song says.”
“Yeah. That’s sort of been my experience,” Prosper said.
“Oh?” Vi smiled, taking notice, her eyes soft for once, and she
spread out in the bed as though the coarse sheets were silk and she
liked the touch of them. “You got a lot of experience?”
“Some,” he said.
“Going way back?”
She was amused, apparently thought his claim was sort of funny,
extravagant or unbelievable, though he was trying to speak modestly.
“Pretty far,” he said.
“Really.” She rolled over and propped her broad cleft chin in a
hand. “You’re not that old.”
Prosper shrugged one shoulder.
“I wouldn’t have thought,” she said. “I mean, no offense, but it
wouldn’t seem you’d get around a lot. See and be seen. You know.
Some things you might not get around to doing.”
“Well not so many.”
“Uh-huh.”
100 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
There were, actually, plenty of things Prosper hadn’t ever done, and
some that he hadn’t done in years. He’d never gone to the public library
up to the far-off double doors of the local one, or the even longer flight
(why “flight,” Prosper’d often wondered) to the even farther-off doors
of the central one downtown. Before his operation he’d gone on city
buses and on streetcars, when he could scoot up the stairs like a
monkey—everybody compared him to a monkey, his sloping back like
a knuckle walker’s and his long arms and big hands reaching for hand-
holds; something narrow about his pelvis too like the narrow nates of
a chimp. But by the time he reached what neither he nor anyone around
him then knew to call puberty (those gloomy films that Vi had seen in
high school—the ones shown in two versions, male and female—
weren’t shown to the special classes, as though there were no need for
Prosper and the others to have the information) he could no longer
mount the steps of a streetcar, couldn’t bend his knees when locomot-
ing, only when seated, with the locks on his braces slipped. That was
after his operation. He’d been to the movies, before that operation;
after it, getting to the pictures from his house had been the hard part,
and before his uncles Mert and Fred had taken him in hand and begun
squiring him around in the auto he’d missed a lot of good pictures.
Yes, lots of things undone, but lots of things done too, and many
(he might say “many,” though without any basis for comparison as
Pancho would put it) were of the kind Vi doubted.
“So tell me,” Vi said, still amused, seeming ready to hear something
funny, funny because it wouldn’t be what he claimed it was. She’d
know the difference. “Your turn.”
“Tell you what? You know my story.”
“These experiences, Prosper,” she said, “is what I mean.”
“You want to hear?”
“I do. It’s your turn. You tell me, and I’ll just listen.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t leave things out.”
“Okay.”
She lifted a forefinger gently to his lips, but as though to open them
rather than seal them. “Tell me,” she said.
PART TWO
1
Like the disabled and transected body of the Pax B-30 that once
lay in the long grass of the field over Hubbard Road from the
Ponca City Airport, the orthopedic hospital where Prosper Olan-