by John Crowley
was careful to wear them for her visits, but it somehow didn’t seem to
win her, and he wanted to win her, trying various blandishments that
she seemed to have little interest in, or scorned as childish. She was
restless, bored, irritable, he knew it but couldn’t fix it. On an after-
noon hotter than any before, hottest in history but probably not as hot
as tomorrow or the next day would be, she was staring at him in some
dissatisfaction where he stood.
“Let’s pretend,” she said. “Let’s pretend that it’s me who needs
them and you don’t.”
“What?”
“The braces. Let’s pretend.”
He didn’t play let’s-pretend any longer, and not only because he’d
had no one to play with. Somehow that mode or way of being had been
left behind, in the world before the hospital, where he was not now.
“Why do you want to do that?”
“Let’s just,” she said.
148 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Her unsad sadness. It was those strange eyebrows, maybe, surely.
“Okay,” he said.
“Take them off.”
“Okay.”
Okay: so that’s what they did, that day and each hot day after that:
she would sit on the floor of his room, take off her shoes and stockings,
push up her skirt, pull on the stockings he used, and buckle on his
braces. She was older than he but about the same height, and her legs
were not much longer than his. He buckled them for her at first but she
said he never did it tight enough. Then they sat together and played
Parcheesi or drew with the art supplies and ate crackers until she went
home. She never tried standing. He never learned what it was she
wanted from them, and she said nothing more, but when she wore
them she seemed at once content and turbulent, and within the circle of
her swarming feelings he felt that too. It all stopped one day when May
came home ill from work, and found Elaine with Prosper’s braces on,
her skirt hiked up to her waist (she liked to look down at them often as
she read or played), and Prosper without his pants on (for he’d taken
them off to surrender the braces to her). May was generous about many
things, a taker of the Long View, but this fit nowhere in her picture of
life, and Elaine never came back again. Nothing was said to Prosper. A
week later, school started.
The bus that made its rounds through his part of town picking up the
students of the special health class arrived at the school building a little
after all the other students were beginning their classes—Prosper and
the others walking or rolling in could hear them reciting in unison
somewhere—and it returned for them just before three o’clock, was
awaiting them just beyond the ramp, engine running, when they were
dismissed: they’d begun climbing or being lifted aboard by the driver
and his husky helper even as the bell of the school exploded like a giant
alarm clock and the kids inside poured shrieking out. Some of those
aboard the bus looked out longingly at the games forming up on the
playground, one perhaps naming a child out there among the capture-
the-flag or pitch-penny gangs who had once said something pleasant to
him or to her; Prosper wouldn’t do that. He was he, they were they.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 149
Back home again he went to his room and took up his work where
the day before he had left off.
He’d learned a lot from his book of Commercial Art and Studio
Skills, and what of it he couldn’t understand he made his own sense
of. He used all the tools and the inks and the papers, the French
Curve, the Mat Knife, but what he loved best were the Ruling Pens,
which made the perfect even lines he saw in columns of type and
bordering newspaper ads, squared at each end as though trimmed by
scissors. He’d later learn that his method of using them was all his
own—like a man who learns to play a guitar the wrong way around—
but he got good at it. You turned a little dial atop the nib to narrow
or broaden the stripe it scribed. He still never tried to make pictures,
or copy nature, or draw faces. He created the letterheads of imagi-
nary companies (ACME with beautiful winged A). But most of his
time was spent producing, with great care and increasing realism, the
documents—tax stamps, stock certificates, bank checks (he’d studied
forms for these in sample books that May in puzzlement brought
home for him)—of a nonexistent country. Once it had been a real
place, he’d found its name in a ragged set of books on the shelf called
the People’s Cyclopedia: the Sabine Free State. At some past time it
had been part of the territory of Louisiana. The Sabine Free State had
been the home of the Redbone people, though no more, and no one
knew where the Redbones who had once lived there had come from,
or where they had gone. As he drew and lettered and crosshatched
with precision he could see in his imagination the places and people
of the Sabine Free State, the streets of the capital, the white-hatted
men and white-dressed women like those in magazine pictures of hot
places; the brown rivers and the cone of an extinct volcano, Bea’s
postcards of Mexico showed him those; the files of dark Redbone
women bearing baskets of fruit on their heads. He saw all that, but
what he drew were only the visas, permits, railroad shares, docu-
ments headed with the crest of the state: wings, and a badge, and a
curling banner with the unintelligible motto that all such things
seemed to have, Ars Gratia Artis, E Pluribus Unum. The motto of
the Sabine Free State he took from what May and Bea had first spelled
out on the Ouija board that guided their meditations: Fenix
Vigaron.
150 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Prosper went to the special class in the school for two years. Bea and
May gave him valuable advice on how to pay attention and please
those in authority without yielding up your Inner Self to them. He
was among the most able in that class, as he was among the least in
his old school, which somehow didn’t seem to add up to an advan-
tage, but it gave him a certain standing with the girls. In the boys’
toilet he learned what he would learn of the vocabulary employed in
what Bea called the gutter, trying to work out the meaning of each
new term without admitting he didn’t have it down already, and fall-
ing for some common jokes ( ’D you suck my dick if I washed it? No?
Dirty cocksucker! ). Then in the next year there was no city or state
money for it any longer, no money for anything, and certainly not for
a special health bus and a special class; tax revenues had evaporated
just as the welfare services were overwhelmed with desperate need,
more every day, husbands deserting families to go try to find work
somewhere and just disappearing, children living on coffee and crack-
ers and pickles, pitiable older men in nice suits with upright bearing
and faces of suppressed dismay as though unable to believe they’d
come to ask the city for food and shelter. May
saw her pay cut; there
was not a big call to furnish new offices. Bea’s commission on per-
fumes and oils went down.
What would the two aunts do with him now? Miss Mack had
shaken her head wordlessly when Bea brought up the State School as a
possibility. But she did tell them (with some reluctance, it was easy to
see) about a Home in another part of town, and May one hot day,
without telling Bea, took a trolley out. Just to look at it. She’d never
been inside such a place, had only seen them in the movies or read
about them in novels, where orphans and crippled children were helped
by warmhearted baseball-playing priests, tough hurt boys who learned
and grew. The place itself when she reached it was smaller than she’d
expected, just a plain brick building amid old streets in a featureless
neighborhood. The first thing she noticed was that the windows were
barred: even the wide balconies that might have been nice places to sit
were fenced with wire barriers. Alarm made her tongue-tied, and she
asked the wrong questions of the torpid caretaker, and was refused a
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 151
look around, though she could hear a faint uproar. She’d have to make
an application, she was told. Couldn’t she just meet some of the chil-
dren? Perhaps if she came on visiting day. Bea was feeling faint with
sorrow, as though the walls were soaked with it. She seemed to smell
cat piss, though there were no cats here.
She wandered, trying to peer down bleak corridors and into rooms.
She got a glimpse of a line of girls being taken from a classroom, she
thought, to somewhere else. The girls were dressed alike in gray jump-
ers washed a thousand times, their hair cut short, for lice maybe.
Coldly strict as their teacher was she couldn’t get them to march
straight. So many different things were wrong with them May couldn’t
distinguish. One looked back at May, dull drawn face, wide-set eyes: a
mongoloid, perhaps, but surely a soul, what would become of her.
May went home in the awful heat and never spoke of her trip. She
convinced Bea it’d be all right, that Prosper was old enough to stay
home alone; they’d get lessons from the school if they could, and do the
best they could when they could.
By then Prosper was almost fourteen, and should have been going
into high school, even if the actual grades he’d passed through didn’t
add up to that. The high school had never had provision for special
cases like his; if he reached the eighth grade he was considered to have
received as much benefit from education as he was ever likely to use—
enough to get a job if he could hold one, and if he couldn’t, more than
he needed.
So he was on his own. With Bea and May he worked out a schedule,
which May typed up at work—Prosper’s name at the top of the sheet
all in capitals, entrancing somehow. From eight to nine, he was to clean
his room and as much of the rest of the house as he could manage;
from nine to ten, physical exercise, as prescribed by the hospital,
including stretching a big rubber band as far and in as many directions
as he could. Ten till noon, reading and similar pursuits. Lunch, and so
on. In the afternoon, practice his art skills; walk to the corner store if
the weather was all right, carrying the string bag, and bring back
necessities for dinner. May started instructing him in cooking, and
within a few months he was regularly making dinner for them, maca-
roni, cutlets, potatoes with Lucky corned beef from a can, an apron
around his middle and spoon in his hand. When they tired of his
152 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
menus, May taught him something new out of the greasy and spine-
broken cookbook.
Prosper thought getting on with his education would be a simple
matter. The People’s Cyclopedia, with many pearly illustrations that he
liked to look at and even touch—the Holy Land, Thomas Edison in his
laboratory, the Russian Fleet at Port Arthur, the Three Graces by
Canova. He’d just start with volume I and read through to the end. The
three naked Graces, holding one another in languid arms and touching
as though comforting or merely enjoying one another, were in C, for
Canova, the sculptor. Halfway through that first volume ( Bulbul, Bul-
garia) he gave up. There was a Bible on the same shelf, and since it at
least was only one volume he decided to start on that instead. No one in
his family had cared much about church, though Prosper’d been told to
answer Protestant when asked what religion he was. There was supposed
to be a minister among the ancestors on one side of the family, and at
least one Jew on the other, and they seemed to cancel out, at once fulfill-
ing the family’s religious obligations and nullifying them. Prosper asked
Bea, as he was beginning his new enterprise, if she believed in God.
“Of course I do,” she said. She was cleaning the polish from her
nails. “What do you take me for?”
“Jesus too?”
“Sure.” She hadn’t looked up from her nails. As an answer to his
question this seemed definite but not definitive, and he couldn’t think
of another. He went on reading, turning the crinkly translucent pages,
but grew increasingly mystified after the first familiar stories (familiar
but not quite identical to the ones he knew or would have said he
knew). He made his way through the rules of Deuteronomy, wondering
if anyone had ever really followed them all and what kind of people
those would be; and he came upon this:
When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the
Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou
hast taken them captive, and seest among the captives a beauti-
ful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have
her to thy wife; Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house,
and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; And she shall
put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 153
thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month:
and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and
she shall be thy wife. And it shall be, if thou have no delight in
her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt
not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of
her, because thou hast humbled her.
He was alone in the house, winter coming on and the lone lightbulb
that May allowed to be lit dull and somehow melancholy in its inade-
quacy. Prosper thought: I wouldn’t put her out. He’d explain the rule,
that she had to shave her head and take off her clothes, but it wasn’t his
rule, just the rule. He supposed he couldn’t tell her he was sorry about
destroying her city and killing her people, since the Lord said to do it,
and it had to be all right. But he wouldn’t put her out, not if she was
that beautiful to begin with. I won’t put you out, he’d say to her. You
can stay as long as you want. She’d have to and she’d want to, he was
<
br /> sure. She’d stay with him in his tent, naked inside with him, and she’d
get over her grief.
He closed the perfumey-smelling Bible and went to get the first
volume of the Cyclopedia, to look up C for Canova.
Meanwhile things just kept getting worse, although (as the Presi-
dent had said, standing in his top hat high up on the Capitol steps) the
worst thing about it sometimes was just the fear, the fear that you’d
lose your grip on the rung you’d got to and go down not only into pov-
erty but also shame. The women worried for Prosper, how he’d ever
make out, and they were right to worry, because the margin for him
was thin, and in that time there were many whose thin margins, the
thinnest of margins, just evaporated. It happened every day.
It might be that May and Bea conceived that Charlie Coutts would
never want or need to use that telephone number that May’d given
him, not that she was being insincere or hypocritical when she did so,
it had just been one of those moments of sudden fellow-feeling that are
forgotten about as soon as made. And she had forgotten it when the
’phone rang in the house and May tried to figure out who was on the
line, which was hard because that person—it was Charlie’s father—
didn’t have either of the women’s names, which Charlie hadn’t remem-
bered, though he’d kept hold of the number.
154 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
When they’d straightened that out, Mr. Coutts said that Charlie
had been thinking of Prosper (he said “Proctor” at first) and had always
been grateful for how Prosper had befriended him in the hospital, and
wanted to ask if Prosper could come visit someday, at his convenience.
In a rush—maybe making up for her initial coldness to someone she’d
thought was a stranger or maybe a crank caller—May said sure, of
course, and even issued a counter-invitation, maybe Charlie could
come and visit at Prosper’s house: an invitation Mr. Coutts quickly and
with what seemed profound gratitude accepted, somewhat surprising
May, who didn’t try to take it back though. Charlie and his father lived
in a far part of town, and May—in for a penny, in for a pound—said
that Charlie was welcome to stay the night if that was more conve-
nient; and she hung up in a state of apprehension and gratified benevo-
