by John Crowley
ing villain or dropped gun that couldn’t be seen before, Prosper real-
ized that it was actually his father who had bound up his wounds,
118 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
carried him to bed in fever, washed out the white enamel basin ( Hasten
Jason bring the basin) with the horrid black chipped spots in it; and
that therefore it had certainly cost him something when his father
blew.
He would think then: There are thoughts you never think until, for
the first time, you do think them. And he would remember his father
telling his jokes, salesman’s patter, even as he cleaned the boy that
Prosper had been.
It wasn’t that his mother neglected cleanliness, health, and the body.
They were ever present to her mind, a threat and a promise she could
never get working together. She had been raised on medicine as though
on food: Wendigo Microbe Killer, Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, Hamlin’s
Wizard Oil liniment, Doctor Flint’s Quaker Bitters, cod-liver oil in the
winter and sulphured molasses in the spring. After her only child was
born she felt she deserved Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound to
reverse the bad effects; she sucked Smith Brothers cough drops (which
she fed to Prosper too) and was a user of Hadacol, which she found lots
better for her headaches than Coca-Cola. And as within, so without:
Prosper’s earliest memory was of hearing the enormous Hoover start-
ing up somewhere in the house, brand-new then possibly, anyway
unknown to him, an inexplicable noise at once roar and shriek and
coming closer; moving away; closer again, and evidently seeking him
out where he lay in bed. Then to find the great gray floor-sucker thing
entering his room, manipulated by his grim-faced mother, therefore
not dangerous at all, maybe.
His mother feared germs; her own earliest memory was watching
her bedroom stripped of its bedclothes, curtains, and toys, to be burned
in the alley after her scarlet fever. The Hoover was her defense, or her
offensive, against germs, that and lye soap, naphtha flakes, carbolic,
Old Dutch cleanser with the furious punitive bonneted figure on the
can that Prosper took as the image of his mother’s spirit, and scrub
brushes boiled weekly. Prosper, already afflicted by troubles that
seemed to get worse as he grew, caused her endless worry, she almost
feared to touch him, not only because of what he had inside him but
because of what he might have touched in the filthy world outside.
Once he brought home a stray dog, sick too, half-carrying it into the
house and supposing he might be able to keep it. His mother blocked
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 119
him and it with a broom from entering, prodding them away desper-
ately and calling on the deities. After that when she was sunk in her
cleaning he could sometimes hear her mutter the dog, that dog.
So if it had been up to her, Prosper likely wouldn’t have gone into
that hospital or under that knife, and what would have happened
instead was unknowable, and still is. It was Miss Mary Mack, her eyes
and eyelashes glittering as though frosted and her cheeks red from the
cold, who came to fetch him and bring him back there, which for all he
then knew she did out of kindness only: kind too to his helpless inert
mother fretting on the kitchen chair with two aprons on. Held his hand
when they mounted to the streetcar. Prosper found a certain satisfac-
tion, on his return, in telling his mother how blood had been taken
from him, right from the crook of his arm where this gauze was now
wrapped, and how he watched it rush out to fill the glass needle, thick
and dark as beet soup.
Just before he went into the hospital for the surgery, the Odd Fel-
lows held a little ceremony where the check for the costs was presented
to the hospital. The Odd Fellows ranged on the steps of the hospital
with the director and a doctor (who had to be persuaded to don his
white coat for the picture). Of the children who were to benefit from
the lodge’s efforts, Prosper and the pale blond girl were chosen to par-
ticipate in the event, Prosper with a tie of his father’s on and the girl in
white with a white hair bow so huge that it seemed she might be able to
flap it and fly away—and she looked as though she wanted to, stricken,
eyes alert as though to danger or downcast in shame. Prosper talked to
her. Her name was Prudence, and he laughed a little at that, mostly
from fellow-feeling with someone else not named Joe or Nancy, but she
only lowered her eyes again as though he’d mocked her. Still he stood
protectively by her while the pictures were taken and the man from the
newspapers asked their names. “Her name is Prudence. My name is
Prosper. P-r-o-s-p-e-r. Will the picture be in the paper?”
It was. It appeared the morning he was to go with his mother to be
admitted, a little suitcase packed with clean skivvies and socks and a
toothbrush and a dictionary (his mother’s choice) and some tonics and
vegetable pills (likewise). He studied the picture with her. There he was
with a big smile that made his mother shake her head, and Pru, her
great eyes looking up as though out of a burrow.
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“Don’t let it turn your head,” his mother said, and it was the last
thing he clearly remembered her saying to him, though no doubt she
said more than that, taking him to the hospital and getting him onto
his white bed in the big ward and kissing him good-bye. Maybe because
he’d never heard the phrase before, and had to puzzle out its meaning.
Once, when months had passed, awake in the night in his plaster jacket
immobile in that ward, he thought what she had done was to warn
him: don’t let them turn your head. And unwittingly he had done that,
he had let them turn his head, and all that resulted was his own fault.
He’d imagined, for no good reason, that Pru would be given the bed next
to his, but in fact she wasn’t even in the long room of parallel beds, she
was in the ward below, for girls—he learned that when both their
wards and others joined in the great sunroom for marching each morn-
ing to a Victrola. Three mornings: he saw her each time, and spoke to
her, and at last she smiled to see him, her only friend (so her smile
seemed to say). Around and around they went as the oompah music
played, stopped, and began again, some of them on crutches, others
pushing themselves along on rolling frames or staggering rhythmless
on legs of different lengths. Pru walked as though always in the process
of falling over to her left, as her spine went, but she never did; she held
her hands curled up to the breast, as though she held an invisible plumb
line there, to see how far from true she bent, and to try and
straighten.
“Did you see your picture?” he asked her.
She looked away.
“You looked pretty,” Prosper said.
She looked into the distance, as though searching the halting shuf-
fling crowd for someone she knew.
“Do you talk?” Prosper said smiling. “Cat go
t your tongue?”
He thought the shadow of a smile crossed her face but still she
wouldn’t speak. The music stopped, skritched, resumed.
On the fourth morning they began to build Prosper’s cast, and there
was no more morning marching for him.
He had two nurses attendant on him for this, one kindly and calm,
the other brisk and dismissive of fears; the one lean and snaggletoothed,
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 121
the other plump and soft-armed. They had him follow them out of the
ward (observed by everyone) and down the hall to a bright room where
there was a table covered in rubber sheeting and piles of other things.
Talking, talking, first one then the other, they pulled off his nightshirt,
which they called a johnny for some reason, and hoisted him onto the
table to lie facedown, a little pad for his cheek, the horrid cold rubber
under his nakedness. He knew you were not supposed to mind if nurses
or doctors saw your posterior.
“He’ll be a brave little fella,” said Nurse Kind.
“He better be,” said Nurse Brisk. “This’s the easy part.”
They had sheets of black felt and a big scissors, and cut pieces out
and laid them on his back from neck to knees, patting and stretching
them into place. Then they ran water at a sink and did other things he
couldn’t see while they talked to each other about this and that, Hoover,
the talkies, Rudolph Valentino and Rudy Vallee—for a long time Pros-
per thought these were the same person, one the nickname of the
other.
“Okay dearie, this is going to get a little damp,” said Nurse Kind.
“Move a muscle and I’ll brain you,” said Nurse Brisk, which made
Nurse Kind laugh dismissively. Something wet and heavy was laid on
him, at his neck, and the nurses ceased their chatter, only murmuring
to each other as they worked the wet plaster bandages to fit him before
they hardened. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before and the desire to
wriggle out of it, clamber up and get out, was nearly irresistible, the
nurses must have known it and kept their hands on his legs and head to
keep him still while the clock on the wall ticked away.
When they were done, they removed the hardening cast, turned him
over and made the front the same way, right down to his groin, leaving
a space for him to make water. The back side had a hole too, neatly
edged in rubber. They showed it to him when it had all dried and been
trimmed and lined with felted cloth and fitted with straps and toothed
buckles; it was the last time he’d see the backside till it came off, long
after.
Laid in this cast like a turtle—the plastron part could be unbuckled
and removed, now and then, but he was told never to get out of the
back part—he should not even allow himself to think about getting
out. He didn’t have to lie flat on his back, the bed itself had a crank
122 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
that could move it up and bring the world into view and his head in
right relation to it, gratifying.
In the next bed a boy was looking at him, or seemed to be looking
at him, though his head and face were hard to assess, because he
seemed to be in the grip of some invisible opponent he wrestled with,
straining every muscle. He made sounds that might have been lan-
guage.
“Did he say something?” Prosper asked the nurse.
“May have,” the nurse said, not looking at the fellow. “Sometimes
he does. He’s a spastic and we don’t know what else.”
Prosper looked over at the boy in the bed. He was definitely study-
ing Prosper, though with what intentions or thoughts Prosper couldn’t
tell—not dull or idiotic he was pretty sure. “Hello,” he said.
The other seemed gratified to be greeted, and said something back.
“Try harder, Charlie,” said the nurse, not looking at him. “Or be
quiet. Nobody can guess what you mean.”
Charlie rose up in his bed, as though lifting himself by puppet
strings, and seemed ready to fling himself out, his mouth working. The
nurse turned to him and, hand on his chest and her face close to his,
pushed him back. “I’ve told you about this, Charlie. You lie still and be
a good boy. It’s for your own safety. Don’t make me get the straps.”
At this Charlie sank back and stopped talking, though he went on
moving; if you watched you could tell that the muscles he gave orders
to were constantly revolting or refusing, and he had to continually
change the orders, so that he was never quite still. When the nurse had
passed to the next bed, Charlie spoke again to Prosper.
“Sheeez a caution. Ain she.”
“I’ll say,” Prosper answered.
“Oooh shth. Shthink she. Is. Muscle Eenie?”
It wasn’t hard to understand once you listened. Prosper got it and
laughed, and Charlie laughed too. Nurse Muscle Eenie turned to look
back at them—like all powerful persons, she had a keen sense of when
she was being mocked—but that only made them laugh the more.
Prosper, spending long hours beside Charlie, got good at under-
standing what he said, and sometimes translated what he said for the
nurses, who seemed to have very little patience with him and to assume
most of the time that he was muttering nonsense, and would talk back
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 123
to him as though he were a baby. “He’s not stupid,” he explained to
one of the nurses as Charlie listened. “He’s just spastic. If you listen
he’s not stupid.”
“He’s not a spastic,” said this nurse. “He’s an athetoid. There’s a
difference.”
Prosper actually thought Charlie was the wittiest kid on the ward,
his jokes all the funnier for being unexpected or hard to decode—it
really was hard to tell when Charlie was trying to be funny, though
Prosper got that too at last.
The other person who understood Charlie fine was his father, who
came often to see him, once bringing Charlie’s mother and three small
sisters, though all these visitors were too uproarious and Nurse Muscle
Eenie made it clear that from now on they were to come one at a time
and not upset the routine as she said. So it was mostly his father who
came, and sat by his bed; his presence seemed to still Charlie’s mus-
cles, at least to lower the spasms from a boil to a simmer. It was Char-
lie’s father who explained to Prosper that Charlie’s muscles weren’t
weak, they just wouldn’t listen to his brain. They were plenty strong:
in fact Charlie was here to get a couple of them released—they’d been
holding parts of Charlie tight since he was a baby, and didn’t know
how to let go.
“So he’s gotta go under the knife,” said Charlie’s father smiling a
little sadly. “Right, son?”
“That’ll show ’em,” Charlie said. He held up his left hand, which
curled backward toward his wrist, and made a face at it that was sup-
posed to be tough and uncompromising.
Prosper’s mother came too, once, though she had a great reluctance
to come too close to where Prosper la
y in his cast; she stood a ways off,
her hands clasped, as though the left were keeping the right from touch-
ing anything around her. Prosper could tell she suffered, though not
what she suffered from, and tried to ask her about life out beyond the
hospital; he told her about Prudence and about Charlie and his mus-
cles, but she seemed not even to want to open her mouth much and
swallow the air in there.
“I’m going under the knife,” Prosper said. “Any day.”
“Oh Prosper,” she said. “Oh Prosper.”
Soon the nurse came close: visiting hours were over, ambassadors
124 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
from the world beyond were to depart. Prosper’s mother kissed her
son. The ward returned to the state it ought to have, just the children
and their noises and cries, the circulation of the nurses, like horses in
their sweaty hardworking domineering presence, great rumps and
thighs beneath their white cottons or lean hard shins and the crack of
their heels against the ward floor. They caught boys out of bed and
heaved them back in like grain sacks, threatened and chastened and
stilled them with a look as Miss Vinograd had done, though they were
gentle with the ones who moved less or not at all, teaming up to move
them from their beds to the rolling carts that took them to hydrother-
apy or elsewhere, who knew where, and back again. On three, lift.
Prosper’s turn at last, after the nurse had rung the curtains around
his bed and washed him with some awful carbolic. A long black razor
on the tray, opened, and a bowl of soapy water—they shaved his back
and buttocks right down into the crack, why, when there wasn’t any
hair there. Charlie’d said they would: Doan ledm slice your GNUTS
opff, he’d cried.
They put a mask over his face, and told him to count backward from
ten, and that’s all he knew of that afternoon, until he knew himself to
be back in the ward again, his head at least afloat above a body that
seemed not to be his. Nurse Muscle Eenie told him that while he lay
there neither in nor out of the world his mother had come to visit him.
Charlie confirmed it—a lady came and sat and stood by him; Charlie
tried to imitate how she had hovered, how she had wrung her hands.
Prosper felt, when they said these things, that yes, she had been there,
had looked down on him, but in his remembrance she’d worn a white
