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Four Freedoms

Page 13

by John Crowley


  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
r />   in the city where he’d grown up, never managed the long flight of stairs

  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-

 

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