Four Freedoms

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.

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  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.

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  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-