Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  dress and a white veil, like nurses in pictures during the War, maybe

  even a cross on her breast, and that couldn’t be; the picture persisted,

  though, and when he was older he’d still be able to summon it up, and

  question why he’d got it in his mind—maybe he’d mixed it up with a

  nurse who’d also leaned over him, but the nurses there weren’t wearing

  those angel outfits any longer; maybe he’d got it from a movie, but

  which one? Anyway he’d somehow missed her, this nonsensical scrap

  all he had, and she didn’t come again. She’d got sick, the nurses told

  him. She’d sent a message. She was thinking of him, but too sick right

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  then to visit. For days Prosper himself was too sick to think of any-

  thing; and when he was no longer sick he was so changed he didn’t

  know how to think of her or where he had come from. He’d been put

  to sleep in the hospital, and when he awoke fully—when the spell was

  lifted—he was still there, only now it was where he lived, and always

  had been.

  The next thing he would remember with any clarity was the doctor,

  his white coat collared like a priest’s, who came to hover over him,

  read his chart and tell him what had happened to him in that limbo.

  The operation on his back had gone well, the doctor said. He would

  stand straighter than he had before. He wouldn’t be able to bend over

  quite as well, but he hadn’t been able to bend very well before, except

  at the waist, wasn’t that true? It was true. Prosper hadn’t yet tried

  bending over with his new back so he didn’t know what the difference

  would be.

  “Better than that,” the doctor said. “It won’t get worse now. If we’d

  done nothing it would have got worse.”

  Prosper couldn’t respond to that. They’d told him often, the doctor

  and the nurses, that he’d get worse and worse if he didn’t have the

  operation, but he hadn’t felt himself to be in bad shape, and didn’t

  know what “worse” would mean.

  “All right,” he said.

  “So.” The doctor smiled, ready to move on.

  “But can you tell me,” Prosper said, “how come I can’t move any-

  thing.” He made to move a leg, to show him it couldn’t.

  “Temporary,” the doctor said. “You’ll get over that.”

  Maybe it was temporary, though everything that happened in those

  days was so new and unknown, any transformation or decline or wast-

  ing or empowerment possible, that even transitory states seemed to be

  forever, no matter what the nurses said; Prosper poked at his unresist-

  ing thighs, as cold-skinned as a chicken leg and seemingly no more

  his.

  Each day a nurse removed the front of his brace and washed him.

  Then the brace was buckled back together, and two nurses lifted him

  in his brace and with great care and much instructing of each other

  they turned him over, and let him lie facedown for a time. It was like

  turning over in sleep, except that it took a very long time, and two

  126 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  other people. After a week, it was different when the nurse came to

  wash him. He was different. He could feel it: the warm water, the

  smooth soap, the rough cloth. Not the way he had before, but as though

  he were awaking with the sun and hearing confused noises not yet

  resolved into birdsong and kitchen clamor. He could feel it and held his

  breath. His penis when the nurse lifted and swiped it, swiped under his

  testicles, suddenly rose and swelled, as though also startled awake. She

  cleaned his inner thighs and reached deep down between his legs. Pros-

  per thought of looking at the ceiling, or closing his eyes, but couldn’t.

  Without looking away from her job the nurse said, “Feeling a little

  better, huh?” and at the same time flicked at his crotch with the middle

  finger of her free hand, the way you do when you want to send some-

  thing—a spitball, a bug—a good distance; her nail struck sharply

  against the tender underside of the pink head that was peeking boldly

  out, Prosper yelped, and the whole collapsed and shrank.

  Feeling better. Still his legs remained cold, as though asleep, below

  the middle of his thighs. In a few days the doctor came again, and

  lifted Prosper’s legs, and laid them down again. He talked to the nurse

  about Prosper’s back, his legs, the healing of his wound (they called it

  a wound, as though they had done it by accident), and he went away

  again, with a wink at Prosper that made him wonder.

  After a month he came back, and this time drew up a chair by

  Prosper’s bed to have a talk.

  “So the operation was a success, and your back is doing well,” he

  said. “But it didn’t go as well in another way.”

  Prosper grew momentarily conscious of the cast he lay buckled in.

  The doctor was regarding him, maybe with truth and frankness in his

  steady gaze, but it seemed sinister to Prosper, the intense stare of people

  in the movies who are about to reveal crimes, or accuse others of them,

  or change people into monsters.

  “The side effects of an operation like this can’t be predicted,” he

  said. “It hasn’t been done in this way for very long. In the future we

  will . . . well. In your own case. There’s a lot of complex innervation

  running up that spine of yours. Well up everybody’s. And placing the

  instrumentation can have unintended consequences.”

  He put a hand strongly but gently on Prosper’s leg. Prosper could

  feel the warmth.

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  “You’ve had a certain amount of paralysis.”

  Prosper nodded, not knowing what the word meant exactly though

  it was one spoken around the ward. Infantile Paralysis. “The nurse

  said it would get better,” he said. “It already has.” He almost told

  about how he had felt the nurse washing him, the effect it had had and

  what she’d done, but stopped before he did. “She does the massage

  every day. I couldn’t feel it, now I do.”

  “Well that’s fine,” the doctor said without a smile. “But in the long

  term. You’re going to need some help walking.”

  Prosper pictured two nurses, the nice one, the other, by his side

  always, helping him along.

  “We’re going to teach you all about that. How to use some crutches

  to get along. You’ll do fine when you get used to them. Everybody

  does.” He rose. “You’ll need a little bracing to keep these legs straight

  and strong for that. Braces and the crutches. You’ll get along fine.”

  “Okay,” Prosper said. The two of them, Prosper on the bed and the

  doctor above, with everything and nothing to say. “So maybe I’ll still

  get over it someday.”

  “Sure thing,” the doctor said. “Maybe you will.”

  3

  He’d been in the cast for four weeks, with as much at least left to

  go, when he got a visitor again. His own visitor, not like the

  actress or the ballplayer who visited everybody, going from bed

  to bed followed by reporters and helpers and the doctor, smiling

  and kissing one or two while
the flashbulbs went urgently off.

  Two visitors in fact: his aunts, Bea and May. Bea was the older

  sister of his mother, and May the younger sister of his father. Bea was

  taller and blonder, with heavy curls that seemed to burden her head,

  and May was small and dark, her hair cut short when it became all

  right to do that, and unchanged since. He had never seen them apart,

  so it was also like having one visitor.

  “Hello, Prosper,” Aunt Bea said. “You remember me. And here’s

  May too.”

  “Hello, Aunt Bea. Hello, Aunt May. Sorry I can’t stand up.”

  “Oh, now, Prosper,” said May. The nurse pushed over an extra

  chair by the bed so they could sit, both on their chair’s edge, both

  clutching their purses. “So what now’s all this they’re doing to you? Is

  all this proper?”

  “They have to tug him straight,” said Bea confidentially to her.

  “Well, I must say,” May said, “you’re quite the brave fellow, putting

  up with all this. I never could.”

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 129

  “It’s fine,” Prosper said. “I’ll be doing fine. I might need a little help

  in walking.”

  “Oh. Oh.”

  Charlie in the next bed now stirred, and Prosper—somehow the

  two kind outspoken ladies made him want to be punctilious and cor-

  rect—indicated him. “Aunt May, Aunt Bea,” he said, “I’d like you to

  meet my friend Charlie,” and here he realized he’d never heard or didn’t

  remember Charlie’s last name. Charlie’d come out of his own plaster

  cast in that week, and his muscles, released from long confinement,

  were going crazy, having forgotten all that Charlie had tried to teach

  them or just wild with freedom; he put on quite a show lifting himself

  in the bed to greet the two ladies, sheets astir and pajamas twisted,

  head tugged sidewise and mouth working as though he were catching

  flies around him. But he said “Pleased to meetcha” pretty well, and

  then said it again, happy with the success of it. The two ladies smiled

  and nodded, interested, and Bea took from her large bag a small stack

  of cookies, which she handed around.

  “How’s my ma?” Prosper asked, eating. “Is she coming?”

  Bea and May shared a look—it was a thing they did, that Prosper

  would become accustomed to, their heads turning together like con-

  nected gears to lock in place, and the knowledge, or the unease, or the

  wonderment or puzzlement passing between their wide eyes and big

  long ears, you could almost see it in transit. Then both together back.

  “She’s not been well,” said May.

  “She’s been poor,” said Aunt Bea. “She’s getting better.”

  They added nothing to that, and Prosper didn’t know what further

  to ask. Bea cried Well and from her bag began to take out more things,

  books and puzzle magazines, Lucky bars, the bag was like a magician’s

  fathomless top hat; finally half a cake cut in slices. The ward around

  them, at least those that were mobile, began to be drawn to Prosper’s

  bed like a school of fish to fish food until they were all around and the

  aunts were handing around cake.

  “Prosper, what do you think,” May said. “When you’re all better

  and out of this contraption. Would you like to come and stay with us

  for a while?”

  Prosper’s mouth was full, so he couldn’t say anything, and had a

  moment to think. He liked the women. Once he’d spent a night at their

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  house while his mother went away to another city to visit a practitioner

  of some sort, he couldn’t remember for what illness, and Bea and May

  had entertained him royally, ice cream in three flavors, games of Snap

  and Crazy Eights, dancing to late-night bands on the radio, the two of

  them laughing and pulling his leg and smoking Turkish cigarettes in

  holders. He thought they liked him too, something he was never sure

  about with his parents.

  But he said: “I’d have to go home first. To be with my ma.”

  “Well sure,” May said, and looked away smiling to the crowd of

  hungry jostling boys around her. Bea was helping Charlie with his slice,

  gazing with admiration at how he wielded his fork and made it to his

  face with almost every bite, and didn’t turn to Prosper, as though she’d

  heard none of that. May remarked that when Prosper was out the two

  might get together, he and Charlie, and she wrote down for Charlie her

  own telephone number, which Prosper thought was remarkable.

  Before they left, the aunts brought out one last present they had for

  him, a long box of dark wood with a brass catch, beautiful and rich,

  and inside, richer still, laid into the grooves of the paper liner, a spec-

  trum of colored pencils: all in rainbow order, but shading subtly from

  blue to blue-green to green-blue to green, orange to red-orange, crim-

  son, scarlet. They had all been pointed, not by penknife but by machine,

  flawlessly. He could hardly imagine disturbing them in their perfec-

  tion, almost wanted to assure the two women that he never would,

  never spoil this thing that opened like a promise before him. Later they

  wondered if maybe he hadn’t liked the gift: so quiet. But oh my: the

  poor kid had so much to think about, didn’t he.

  The nurses rigged up a table or desk surface hanging upside down

  from a frame over Prosper’s bed and clipped his papers to it, so that

  even mostly prone he could use his pencils to draw. He started by

  simply edging his papers with great care in bands of color, thicker and

  thinner, as though making a larger and larger frame for a picture that

  he never drew. Then he began making letter shapes, copying from

  newspaper headlines the strange forms full of barbs and hooks and

  thick and thin lines, making up the letters that he couldn’t find. He

  made name signs for the beds of the other boys, each of them putting

  in his own requests as to shape and color and nickname. “We know

  their names,” Nurse Muscle Eenie said, and removed these distrac-

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  tions. He started making only one name, planting the dry sticks of it as

  though in a garden, where it grew strange buds and blossoms in red,

  violet, aquamarine, and sienna: the name was prudence. He’d send

  them with one of the nurses to deliver to her on her ward, and get back

  her thanks or none, and draw another.

  His aunts came now and then to see him, though never his mother.

  On one occasion it wasn’t they but two uncles, whom he knew by sight

  but had rarely spoken to before—Uncle Mert and Uncle Fred, bearing

  a box of chocolates, keeping their hats and coats on. They didn’t have

  much to say. Mert extracted a cigar from his pocket and bit off the tip,

  was about to light it too as the children stared in glee, too bad the

  nurse just then told him no. Mert called her Sister. Say, Sister, when’s

  the boy gonna be up and at ’em. Say, Prosper, you look like a turtle in

  that shell, naw, you look swell, kid. They didn’t stay long, though Pros-

  per shone briefly afterward in the ward in their reflected raffish
glare;

  he made up some stories about who they were and what they’d done.

  It took four months for Prosper to be broken out of his plaster shell,

  his skin flaking and gray and the cast itself loathsome as the grave, but

  himself alive. Two further months to regain the strength in his hips

  and the long muscles of his thighs that still functioned, and to find out

  which those were, and make them move. More months to cast his legs

  and have the steel braces made that from then on he would need to

  stand and to walk; to learn to put them on and take them off by him-

  self, and lift himself up like a stiff flagpole erected, himself the flagpole

  sitter, wobbling high atop them, swept by vertigo—awful to know that

  if he fell, his locked knees would stay locked and he’d go down straight

  and headlong. To learn to walk with them, first in the parallel bars of

  the exercise rooms (the very rooms that he had peeked into on his first

  visit to this place, rooms that he now seemed to have been born and

  raised in) and after that with wooden crutches under his arms. The

  Swing Gait: put both crutches out in front of you and then fling your

  body forward on them, advance the crutches quick enough so you don’t

  fall forward. The more approved Four Point Gait: left crutch tip, right

  foot, right crutch tip, left foot, like a parody of a man free-walking.

  When he got good at it he was allowed to compete in the unofficial

  crutch-racing meets on the ward. On the lower floor he joined the

  marching again, singing and walking at the same time, a good trick.

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  He was walking with Prudence (who still rarely spoke but seemed glad,

  even proud, to have him by her, all he’d wanted) when far off Miss

  Mary Mack came onto the floor—several of the children were her

  responsibility, and they sang out in greeting:

  “Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack

  All dressed in Black Black Black

  With the silver Buttons Buttons Buttons

  All down her Back Back Back.”

  Which more than one of the children really did have, under their

  skin, including Prosper and Prudence, they’d have known it if anyone

  had explained to them what the doctors had done. When the elephant

  jumped the fence in the song and didn’t come down till the Fourth of

  July Prudence suddenly sang out all by herself in a high piercing chal-