by John Crowley
typewriter table that pulled out and sprang into rigidity with a snap, a
secret cash drawer within a drawer—it was the first item of furniture
Prosper recognized as his own, as in fact him in another mode; it
appeared in his dreams for years, altered as he was himself.)
Mert and Fred didn’t appear for this job themselves (they disdained
and shrank from the women as much as the women did from them),
but eventually a couple of fellows in derbies and collarless shirts arrived
in a horse-drawn van and unloaded a cheap and vulgar but serviceable
and brand-new set of furniture of the right type, don’t ask how
acquired, and swapped it for Bea’s and May’s parents’ old moveables,
which they carted away without a word.
“Why don’t you like Uncle Mert and Uncle Fred?” Prosper asked
them as he ate the egg they cooked him every morning, themselves
taking nothing but coffee.
The two turned toward each other, that wide-eyed how-shall-we-
respond look he’d seen before, then to Prosper again.
“First of all,” May said, “they aren’t really your uncles. Mert’s your
mother’s cousin, and I don’t even know what Fred is.”
Prosper didn’t know why that would exclude them from the wom-
en’s world, and spooned the orange yolk from his egg. Now and then
when he’d walked out with his father, he’d been taken into a diner or a
garage to meet the two men, and those three had smoked a cigar
together and talked of matters Prosper didn’t understand, his father
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 141
laughing with them and at the same time somehow shy and cautious,
as though in their debt. He wondered now.
“They hang around down with that icehouse gang,” May said.
“You don’t want to know.”
But he did. Icehouse?
“They’re not bad, ” Bea said, always ameliorative. “It’s not that we
don’t like them. It’s just.”
“They have their uses,” May said regally, and she and Bea laughed
together.
Their place was too small to fit a wheelchair in, even if they could
have afforded one, but May had a wheeled office chair, a model 404D,
the Steno Deluxe, sent over from the business, and Prosper got good at
navigating the space of the downstairs in it, moving quickly hand over
hand from chair back to door frame to dresser like Tarzan sailing
through the jungle on his vines. The women had to roll up and put
away the rug, the beautiful Chinese rug, for him. Prosper only later
understood how many such things they did, how many little costs they
bore, all willingly paid. He had set them a problem, and they would
solve it: for a time, they had to think up something new almost every
day, and Prosper would try it, and at day’s end they’d congratulate
themselves and Prosper that that was done—Prosper had taken a bath
and got out by himself, Prosper had been taken to the hospital for the
sores on his feet, Prosper was going to go to school—and the next day
face another.
They got him to school with the help of Mary Mack, who knocked
one day at the door, appearing like the Marines (May said), face shin-
ing, having lost track of her client when he left the hospital—no one
had told her! She invited May and Bea to share her astonishment at
this, though they knew (and knew Miss Mack knew) that it was they
themselves who had told no one that Prosper had got out—but well!
Back again now, offering help, kidding Prosper (mute with bliss to be
in her radiance again) about playing hooky. Yes of course he’d go to
school. A few years back the progressives on the school board had
passed a resolution, and the city an ordinance, stating that every child
capable of being educated in the public schools ought to be, and accom-
modations must be made in the school, or at home for those unable to
reach the school. And Miss Mack knew that the school to which Pros-
142 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
per would now be going had set up a special classroom that the cripples
and wheelchair-bound children could reach. There was a sort of ramp,
she said, such as wheelbarrows or hand trucks might use, and once
inside there were no stairs to climb. Prosper had kept up with his les-
sons while in the hospital, hadn’t he? Well his teachers would decide
when he got there whether to advance him or keep him back. And how
(May and Bea almost in unison asked) was he to get to and from this
school? Miss Mack drew from her belted black leather satchel the
papers for May or Bea to sign, Prosper’s guardians as they now were or
would become, so that Prosper could ride the special bus that would go
around the district for the children who could not walk to school.
“I could walk,” Prosper said with offhand certainty.
“It’s a long way,” said Mary Mack. She looked long into Prosper’s
eyes, and he looked into hers, deep dark blue and larger than seemed
possible, somehow in his gazing absorbing her divinity unmediated.
“Maybe you should save your strength.”
“All right,” Prosper said, unreleased.
“At first, anyway,” said Mary Mack.
“All right,” Prosper said.
So when September came, there Prosper would go, and what would
come of that the women tried to imagine—how he would be regarded,
whether kindly or disdainfully, and how he would get on included with
a classful of children in his own case or maybe worse—but they couldn’t
imagine, really, and Fenix all that summer was dull or hostile, unre-
sponsive, maybe jealous of the new child in the family.
Bea and May usually spent their week’s vacation at a modest resort
in the mountains, eating vegetarian meals and doing exercises under
the instruction of a swami, but this year they saw that they’d have to be
right there in their own hot house, which they hoped wasn’t a sign of
things to come for them. They played Hearts and cribbage and they
listened to the radio and brought home books for Prosper from the
library. Carefully, one of them on each side of him, they took walks
around the block, returning in a sweat and feeling as though they’d
walked every step of the way in his braces themselves. Once in the
humid night May wept in Bea’s arms, and couldn’t say why: at the
change in their lives that would be forever, at that poor child’s losses,
at his heartbreaking good cheer, at everything.
5
Sometime late in that summer, Prosper made a discovery: his mother
and father were kept in the house, in the big closet under the stair.
Curious and aimless in the hot afternoon, he’d started open-
ing doors and peeking into drawers, learning the place, and this
one last: that smaller-than-normal door, the door with the angular top,
many a house he’d live in afterward would have one, and he’d always
find them sinister. And in there in the dusty shadows, amid the boxes
and a fur coat and a busted umbrella, stood or sat the great gray
Hoover vacuum cleaner his mother had pushed and pulled all morning
twice a week. It was the same one: th
ere was the scar mended with
thread where once the bag had caught on a protruding banister nail
and torn. And close beside it, matrimonially close, his father’s two
leather sample cases, still shut up, buckled and strapped, just as they
had been in the closet beneath the stair in his old home.
Prosper slid from his rolling chair to the floor and crept into the
closet, just far enough so that he could snag one of the cases; he dragged
it out, feeling as though it might have grabbed him instead and pulled
him in. It was heavier than he would have thought, too heavy almost to
carry, and his father had carried both, at least from cab to train sta-
tion, station to hotel, up the stairs of businesses where he talked to
prospects. Prosper knew about that. But somehow he had never known
144 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
just what it was his father had sold. The story about selling, about car-
rying and talking and traveling, didn’t include that; or if it had, it
hadn’t been anything he could speculate about, objects or matter only
usable in the grown-up world, in business, none of his business though.
He tugged at the straps, which had first to be pulled tighter in order to
be released; when they were undone the catch on the top could be
unsnapped, and then the case fell into two, all revealed. In the pockets
and holders and clips were paints in lead tubes, and brushes in gradu-
ated sizes, beautiful pencils not yellow but emerald green, tucked into
a looped belt like cartridges. In other compartments or layers, small
pads and sheets of differing papers coarse to smooth. A case of pen
nibs, all different, from hairstreak-fine to broad as chisels. Other pens
whose use he couldn’t grasp, elaborate heavy compasses, a dozen tools
even more obscure. A thick catalog that showed all those things and
also drafting tables, T squares, cyclostyle machines, airbrushes, gray
pictures of gravely smiling men in bow ties using them.
Commercial Artist’s Supplies was what he sold. The name of the
company and his father’s were on the cards tucked into a special holder
at the case’s top. Prosper could feel the raised lettering on the card
under his finger, as though the words were made of black paint drib-
bled on with supernal precision. Cable COMARTSCO. The second
case, when in a state of strange excitement he extracted and opened it
too, contained more and different things, including three boxes of col-
ored pencils of the kind Bea and May had given him, each full of pen-
cils in more exquisitely graduated colors. For an instant he heard his
father’s voice.
He restored the contents as carefully as he could, shut them up, and
pushed them back beneath the stair beside the Hoover. For a couple of
days he said nothing, at once elated and oppressed by his discovery;
but then, at dinner, he slyly turned the topic to his father and his work,
those big cases he used to carry, what were those? And his aunts both
jumped up at once, went to pull the cases out, glad for him, glad he had
thought of them, glad he wanted to look into them, go ahead! Bea
pulled out from one of the nested compartments a paper book called
Teach Yourself Commercial Art & Studio Skills, and Prosper accepted
it from her with a turn of his heart and a warmth in his throat he
hadn’t known before.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 145
So the great cases went into his room. Bea and May said that the
company’d asked for them back but Prosper’s mother’d never got to it,
and it seemed they’d sent an angry letter while she was in the hospital,
and then they’d quietly gone out of business themselves. If Prosper
wanted a T square and a board they’d have to find them elsewhere.
Meanwhile the women had to return to work, and it was just too
hard to bear thinking of him all alone in the house, for he couldn’t be
a latchkey child, couldn’t run to the park or hop on the streetcar to the
natatorium (they were sure of that). So they asked around the neigh-
borhood for someone who might be induced to come and visit him,
play Parcheesi in the cool of the darkened house, draw and paint, sit on
the porch and drink Coca-Cola; and because they were the persons
they were they didn’t think not to accept when a neighbor lady in pity
assigned her daughter, a year and more older than Prosper, to do this
service. And because Prosper was coming to be the person he was, he
made no objection.
Her name was Elaine, dark and soft; strangely slow and languid she
seemed to Prosper, her fingers moving more tentatively or cautiously to
do any task than his would: he would watch fascinated as she opened a
box of crackers or brought forward her skirt from behind her as she sat.
“What happened to you?” she asked when the grown-ups had all
left them. He had got on his braces to meet her.
“I fell out of an airplane,” Prosper said. He’d had no idea he would
say that until he heard it. “I’ll probably get better.”
She seemed not to hear it anyway. She went on looking at the steel
bars that came out from Prosper’s pant legs and went underneath his
shoes.
“Would you like a soda pop?” he asked. He couldn’t perceive that
she heard this either. Prosper, who was stared at a lot by different
people in different ways, was learning methods of distracting their
gaze, bringing it up to his face, even throwing it off him. Elaine’s he
seemed not to be able even to pull up. It wasn’t one of the usual faces
Prosper knew (but as yet had no name for, couldn’t say he knew): it
wasn’t the cheerful I-see-nothing-out-of-the-way one, or the repelled-
but-fascinated one, or the poor-animal-in-trouble one (head tilted, eyes
big with pity). Elaine just looked, and went on looking. After a time
she arose, in her unwilled way, and came to where he stood. He was
146 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
unsure what she intended; should he step away? Was she headed for
another room, the door out, did she mean to bean him? He’d never
seen such an unknowable face. She stopped before him and squatted.
He stood still. She lifted up the cuff of his trouser to see the shaft of the
brace.
“How high up do they go?”
“Here.” He touched his thigh. She looked up to where he touched,
then at his face, and then, as though snapping out of something, she
stood, turned, and walked away, and proposed a game, and said the
African violets needed watering, and that she herself would be entering
the eighth grade come September, and so went on talking for much of
the day in a steady soft uncrossable stream.
The next day when she came he was sitting in his office chair. He
hadn’t been able to remember, when he woke, what she looked like,
but now he could see that what made her face confusing was the way
her eyebrows were made, lifting up from their outer edges toward the
middle, as though she were perpetually asking a question.
“Why aren’t you wearing those things?”
“The braces? They’re hot. This is easier. Would you like a soda
pop?”
She stood regarding him without responding, listening maybe to
her own thoughts. Looking around in her slow absent-watchful way
she saw his braces, propped against his bed in the parlor he occupied.
She went in, and he followed on the chair. She squatted before the
braces as she had before Prosper, and examined with her slow fingers
the leather straps, the metal bars, the pad that covered his knee.
“Do they hurt?” she said.
“No. They make you sweat. You have to wear long socks. Stocki-
nette.”
“Stockinette,” she said, as though she liked the word. “Are they
hard to put on?”
“Not for me.”
“Let me see.”
“Okay,” he said. Who would have thought someone would ask him
that? But he didn’t mind; it was about his only trick. He slid from the
wheeled chair and to the floor. “I have to take my trousers off,” he said.
Without getting up, Elaine turned herself around. Prosper worked
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 147
off his pants where he sat, and took the long tubes of stockinette from
the bed where he’d tossed them. Elaine, who had been peeking around
to see, now turned, too fascinated not to. Prosper worked the long
stockings up over his legs, then took one of the two frames, lifted his
leg with his hands and fitted it inside. Then the other. He worked his
feet into the Buster Browns that were attached at the bottoms. He
wished it didn’t take so long, he’d like to speed through it like charac-
ters in movie cartoons can do, a momentary blur of activity and it’s
done. He began the buckling, and Elaine came closer.
“Do they have to be tight?”
“Oh yes,” he said. When his shoes were tied he said, “Now watch
this.” He reached out for a crutch, also propped there by the bed, rolled
himself to his side, and with a hand on the floor pushed himself up,
then pulled up farther on the crutch’s crossbar till he was standing up.
“See? Easy.”
“You didn’t put your pants on.”
“Oh. I usually do.” He laughed, but she didn’t; once again she
seemed to remember herself, rose and left the room, and when he had
got the braces off and his pants on again he found her primly seated in
the window seat with a magazine.
Since she evidently liked him better when his braces were on, he
