Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  lenging voice Prosper would not have thought she had, that stilled the

  tall-shoe clumpers and spastics and cripples:

  “July can’t Walk Walk Walk

  July can’t Talk Talk Talk

  July can’t Eat Eat Eat

  With a knife and Fawk Fawk Fawk.”

  In all that time Prosper turned ten and then eleven. He passed from

  fifth grade into sixth, or would have if he’d gone to school; the teachers

  who volunteered on the ward never tried too hard to find out who

  needed to learn what and who already knew it well enough—Amerigo

  Vespucci, i before e except after c, 160 square rods to the acre. He grew two inches taller, though from now on he would grow taller more

  slowly. The stock market crash took all of the family money Nurse

  Muscle Eenie’d put into the Blue Ridge Corporation. Some of the sick-

  est boys vanished from the ward, usually at night, and no notice was

  taken of their absence, not by the nurses, not by the patients; they

  weren’t spoken of again. Charlie went home, a little less knotted up

  than before. Let’s go, son, his father said, grappling him and lifting

  him down from the bed. Prudence went home, in the same white dress

  and bow she’d worn to have her picture taken long ago; straighter now

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 133

  but not all straighter, seeming to handle herself delicately, a tall stack

  of wobbly saucers that might slump and fall. She smiled for him,

  though, and showed him that she was taking all the versions of her

  name he had made home with her. She seemed happier, he thought. He

  never saw her again.

  At the end of the year, his uncles appeared again, without the

  chocolates this time, but with something to impart that they seemed

  to have been ordered to tell him but couldn’t. Each in turn glanced

  now and then behind himself, as though the unspoken thing were

  right behind them, nudging. In the end they only asked several times

  how he was doing, made a joke or two, and hurried away, saying

  they’d be back. It was Aunt Bea and Aunt May who, a day after and

  in the wake of his uncles’ failure, had to come to tell him that while

  he had been in the hospital all this time, his mother had lost ground;

  had worsened; weakened—they took turns supplying words—and

  failed. She had died just about the time (Prosper later figured out)

  he’d first put on his braces.

  Whatever else Prosper would remember of that day, the thing that

  would cause his own heart to fill with some kind of fearsome rain

  when it occurred to him, the thing that for him would always stand for

  human grief unbearable and rich, were the tears that stood in his aunts’

  eyes as they talked to him then, the tremble in their voices. He had

  never seen grown-ups in the grip of sorrow, and though they came

  close and put each a hand on him he couldn’t conceive of it as being on

  his behalf; it was their own, and he would have given anything to have

  been able to say to them It’s all right, don’t cry.

  “My God,” Vi Harbison said to Prosper in Henryville, or to the world and

  the air around.

  “What,” said Prosper.

  “You went in with the bent back and came out and you couldn’t

  walk?”

  “I can walk,” Prosper said.

  “You know what I mean. And then just while you were getting

  better they told you your mother died?”

  “They didn’t want to tell me till I was getting out. So I’d have some

  134 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  relatives, you know, around. They thought it would be tough if I had to

  learn it and then be in the hospital alone.”

  “What did she die of?”

  “I don’t know. No one said.”

  “My God.” Vi’s own mother had passed with her sons and daughter

  around her, her last labored breath; they’d seen her put into her box

  and into the earth and the dirt covering her. She knew. “And by this

  time your father was gone who knew where?”

  “Yes.”

  “My God. You were alone. I can’t imagine.”

  “No I wasn’t actually. There was Bea and May. My aunts. Two

  uncles too.”

  “Aunts and uncles aren’t parents. I mean they can try to do their

  best, but.”

  “Well. I don’t know. It was different.”

  “Well it can’t have been better.”

  “You didn’t know my mother and father,” Prosper said. “You didn’t

  know Bea and May.”

  4

  It will be different when you come out, they all said—Mert and Fred,

  Bea and May, with different faces at the different times when they

  said it—and he had pondered that as best he could, but it wasn’t easy

  to think through what that meant, different; when he looked for-

  ward he saw a world that was all changed but actually all the same,

  because he couldn’t imagine it changed. Once he dreamed of it, all dif-

  ferent, but what was different about it was what was gone: his city, the

  streets, his house and the vacant lots around it and the buildings that

  had looked down on it. What was in their place he couldn’t see.

  It was that way, all changed and the same. Mert and Fred came to

  get him. He could walk out and down the hall and out the door on his

  own, and all the nurses, even Nurse Muscle Eenie, came out of the

  wards and offices to say good-bye and watch him go: first using the

  respectable Four Point, then the faster Swing Gait, an uncle on each

  side of him, one carrying the bag with his things, their hands at the

  ready and making for him nervously now and then as though he were

  an unsteady and valuable piece of furniture they were moving. “Doing

  fine, son,” said a doctor who passed them. He was doing fine.

  The long stairway to the street where Fred had double-parked the

  car was a different matter. Prosper halted at the top, looking down like

  a mountaineer about to rappel. Then Mert picked him up without a

  136 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  word, and as though stealing him he took the steps at a good pace,

  Fred after him. Prosper, pressed against his uncle, could smell Mert’s

  seersucker and even his cigar case; Mert’s breath whinnied faintly up

  his throat.

  They tried to hustle him into the car by main strength, but his rigid

  legs posed a packing problem that they argued silently over until Pros-

  per made them stop. They stood back and watched as he unclipped the

  locks at the knees of his braces and let them down and tucked his legs

  into the car.

  “Easy as pie,” said Fred.

  “Shut up, start the car,” said Mert. A couple of passers-by had stopped

  on the street to gawk at the operation, which Mert wanted to get over

  with. “Rubes,” he said. Fred got the car going. Prosper in the back seat

  laid his head against the leather humps of the upholstery and watched the

  city go past, not the familiar streetcar route but another way, chosen—

  though Prosper couldn’t know it—to bypass his old house.

  “Take Main,” said Mert.

  “Main?”

  “Main. Take Main and turn on Pearl.”

  “Why Pearl?”

  “Just
do it,” Mert said.

  The world was rich and huge. That’s what was different. It poured

  in on him as though it had just come into being, or was coming into

  being as the car drove through it: huge sky, air full of odors, streets full

  of newborn people in new-made coats and hats, ding of a bicycle bell

  like struck crystal. Even the parts of the journey he recognized, streets

  and corners and buildings, come upon sideways or at the wrong end,

  seemed newer, sharper, bigger.

  Then they pulled up before a house he knew, though not, at first,

  what house it was. Fred set the brake but let the motor run, and Mert

  leapt out and came to get Prosper; manhandled him out of the car as he

  had into it, and set him up like a department-store dummy on the side-

  walk before the house, which had by now become the house where Bea

  and May lived, a house Prosper couldn’t help thinking used to be some-

  where else.

  Fred had got out of the car now and come to stand by Prosper. Mert

  brushed his hair with a hand, and Fred set down his bag of things

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 137

  beside him and stuffed a five-dollar bill in his shirt pocket. Then the

  two of them looked at each other, came to a silent agreement, and with

  a quick good-bye, good-bye they climbed hastily back into the impa-

  tiently muttering auto and went off. As in an old comedy, the door

  before Prosper opened at the same moment as the car behind him

  pulled away. His two aunts appeared.

  “Prosper!” Bea said, as though amazed, delighted too.

  “They’re gone,” said May.

  He had been turned over by the two uncles to the two aunts, who

  came out to claim him, one gentle hand each on his shoulders, faces

  with calming smiles bent to look into his.

  “Hello, Aunt May. Hello, Aunt Bea.”

  “Why hello, Prosper. We’re glad you’re here.”

  “May,” said Bea, “how’s he going to get into the house?”

  There were two low steps up to the narrow porch and another into

  the house. If he’d been asked before this day if his aunts’ front door had

  steps up to it, and how many, he wouldn’t have been able to say. There

  was a little bannister for the porch steps, made of coupled plumber’s

  pipes, like those of the practice stairs where Prosper spent many hours.

  He stepped out from the shelter of their hands, swapped his right crutch

  into his left hand, grasped the bannister, and with it and the left crutch

  hoisted himself so that his feet landed on the first step. He steadied

  himself, feeling his aunts’ and the street’s and the world’s eyes on him,

  marveling or doubtful. He did it again. Then again, but this time the

  toes of his shoes caught under the lip of the step. He fell back to start

  over with a bigger stronger push, swinging his feet back and then over

  the lip to land on the porch. A large cat that had just put its head out

  the open door turned and fled from the sight of him. Prosper turned to

  face his aunts, who looked at each other and then at him in wonder-

  ment. How do you like that. Easy as pie.

  Flushed with success, he lifted himself over the threshold and stood

  in the hall. There was a smell of fusty rug, baked bread, the cat, a

  potent odor he didn’t know was incense, Bea’s Fatima cigarettes,

  window box geraniums. Sun came in through the open lace-curtained

  windows of the parlor beyond, falling on a dark velvet hassock and its

  armchair. Far door into a yellow kitchen. Later on, when a sudden

  memory of his standing that morning in the hall of Bea and May’s

  138 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  house would arise in him, Prosper would sometimes feel his breast fill

  with a sob, though it hadn’t done so then; and he never could say just

  what was gathered so densely into that moment as to cause it. Escape;

  refuge; exile too. Relief he couldn’t have accounted for, and grief he

  was not yet even able to measure. His aunts’ true kindness, and every-

  thing that kindness couldn’t assuage. Pride that he had come into their

  house under his own power. New world. Lost life and strength. Maybe

  more than anything it was his memory of that boy’s ignorance, igno-

  rance of the years he would live in the rooms he could see from where

  he stood, and of all that would befall him there: that boon ignorance.

  Bea and May had lived together all of Prosper’s life. Prosper had never

  had much sense of how old they were; he guessed that May was younger

  than Bea, but he was wrong about that. They were the age of his par-

  ents, but in their knockabout freedom they seemed younger, in their

  fearlessness in the world they seemed older. Bea was dizzier, but May

  had done crazier things in her life—Prosper would hear her say this

  was so, but he was left to imagine what the crazy things might have

  been. She seemed to have come to rest in Bea, and was not tempted

  now, though Prosper would have liked to see an outburst or breakout

  of some kind, to know what May might be capable of.

  Bea sold cosmetics at a department store downtown, spraying

  women with little spurts of My Sin or L’Heure Bleue and talking to

  them about their coloration. She had a wide-eyed soft-spoken cheer

  that seemed like total honesty, and she was honest, believed that she

  could suit a woman to a product that would benefit her, and took a

  dollar for a jar of lettuce oil or patent vanishing cream with a feeling of

  having done a good deed all around. May worked as office manager in

  a firm that sold business supplies and furniture wholesale, leather-

  topped desks and swivel chairs and gooseneck lamps and filing cabi-

  nets, as well as typewriters, time clocks, and adding machines. She

  never regarded her job as her calling, as Bea did hers. She complained

  about the time it took from her real life, which was lived in the realm

  of the spirit: her delicate, years-long negotiation with a disembodied

  child who communicated with May by various means. The child—

  whose name was Fenix Vigaron—taught May a lot, but also lied to her

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 139

  atrociously, apparently just for the fun of it, and had another friend

  among the living somewhere in Servia or Montenegro, a friend who

  got different help, maybe better help (the child hinted with casual cru-

  elty) than she was willing to give to May. No one in her office knew

  about May’s other life; but there, with her journal and ledger and her

  in-box and out-box, no matter how fast she moved May seemed to

  herself to be standing still, whereas sitting in stillness awaiting the

  dead child’s touch she seemed always to be moving, however slowly,

  toward something.

  Bea was always glad to get whatever advice Fenix Vigaron had for

  her, but May was shy about revealing her experiences to others; too

  many of them believed in things that May didn’t believe in for her to

  talk to them about Fenix. They would go on about how their mothers

  and lovers and babies had called out to them as they sat holding hands

  in darkened rooms with paid mediums, but—May wanted to know—

  how could the only dead souls who
mattered to you be just the ones

  your medium’s spirit guide could introduce you to? Wouldn’t it be more

  likely that they wouldn’t be acquainted with them, among so many, the

  Great Majority? It was like running into someone who hails from a

  distant city where you yourself know one person, and asking, Say do

  you know Joe Blow, he’s from there—and of course he doesn’t. May’s

  little angel or devil couldn’t give May news of her brother, Prosper’s

  father; she couldn’t say if he was actually among them over there now

  (as May believed), and didn’t seem to care either; nor did she ever come

  to know Prosper’s mother, so as to bring any comforting words from

  her. May told Prosper anyway: your mother’s happy now; nothing can

  hurt her now; I know it’s so. Prosper nodded, solemn, as it seemed he

  should do. Prosper knew nothing then about Fenix Vigaron, though

  Fenix knew all about him.

  The two women had taken on the orphaned Prosper (they’d agreed

  to regard him as an orphan, though Bea had her doubts) because they

  could, and because there was no one else not already consumed with

  their own children, or with the care of some other displaced or incom-

  petent relative, or who wasn’t just unsuitable, like Mert and Fred, into

  whose families (if they could be called that) you wouldn’t want to insert

  any growing innocent.

  But how to meet his needs, practical and spiritual, a male child,

  140 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  they themselves not so young and flexible as once they were? He’d have

  to have a room of his own, and (it took a while for them to grasp this)

  not at the top of the stairs, where theirs and a little spare room were.

  The only choice was the downstairs room the women called the parlor,

  though it was small and dim and they rarely used it, preferring the big

  bright room that ought to have been for dining. Thank goodness the

  bathroom was downstairs.

  So they sent Mert and Fred a note telling them that their next task

  was to empty this room of its horsehair sofa and mirrored sideboard

  and grandfather clock and glass-shaded lamps and store them safely

  somewhere, then bring in instead a boy-size bed, a dresser and a ward-

  robe where he could put away his clothes and his, well, his things,

  snips and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails. A desk May provided from

  work, and a steel lamp to put on it. (This oaken thing, with a hidden