by John Crowley
lence.
Prosper felt a little the same. “Swell,” he said when Bea told him.
“When’s he coming?”
“Next Saturday,” Bea said.
“Swell.”
“Don’t say swell, Prosper. It’s so vulgar.”
His father brought Charlie in an old heap of a car, which drove past
the house and then, as though becoming only slowly conscious of the
address it had passed, cycled back to park against the far curb. Char-
lie’s father, in a windbreaker jacket and hat, cigarette between his lips,
got out and went around to the passenger side to get Charlie out. Bea,
May, and Prosper watched from the house. Prosper remembered the
hospital, more clearly than he had before, when Charlie’s father lifted
him up with that careful love and both arms around him. He set him
down on the pavement. Then with a small grip in one hand and the
other on his son’s shoulder to keep him steady, he aimed Charlie at the
house. The three inside watched him come toward them, Charlie
resembling a man walking under water, seeming to spoon the air with
lifted arms to help push his knees up against some invisible pressure,
uncertain feet falling where they had to. His father bent down and said
something to him around the cigarette, and Charlie hearing it laughed,
head wagging in glee.
They came out onto the porch to greet Charlie, his father guiding
though not aiding him up the stairs. Only when he’d seen the boy to
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 155
the top did he take off his hat and greet the ladies and Prosper. He was
grateful for the invitation. Bea said that Charlie surely had grown, and
certainly he looked to her both larger and more hazardous than she’d
thought he’d be. May invited them both in, but Charlie’s father with a
quiet apology said he couldn’t: he was starting a new job, Swing Shift
at a plant, and didn’t dare take a chance of being late. The women
understood.
“Good-bye, son. Behave yourself.”
“Byda.”
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Charlie liked that joke.
“Charlie!” Prosper said. “Come in and see my art supplies.”
Charlie’s father with a last touch on his son’s shoulder turned to go,
and May stepped down off the porch with him.
“Now, Mr. Coutts, is there anything at all we should know, I mean
what is it we should, you know.”
“Oh he’s fine,” said the man, discarding the remnant of his ciga-
rette in the gutter. “He’ll not give any trouble. You might tuck a big
napkin in his shirt collar at dinner.” He smiled at May. “I’ll be back
tomorrow morning.”
Charlie’d gone into the house with a hand on Prosper’s shoulder.
Bea following after the two of them was made to think how large the
world is, and how little of it we see most of the time. When Prosper’d
got Charlie to his room and seated him on the bed, Bea put her head
around the corner and with a motion drew Prosper out.
“Won’t he need help?” she said. “You should offer him help.”
“No, Aunt Bea. He doesn’t need help. He can do everything fine.
He just has to go slow.”
“Well.” Bea glanced back into the room where Charlie sat, rocking
as though he heard a strange music, or as though now and then some
small invisible being poked him. “If he needs any help you just call.”
“All right.”
“And you give him any help he needs.”
“I will.”
“Don’t wait to be asked.”
“I won’t.”
The women left the boys alone.
156 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
They looked over Prosper’s art supplies, but Prosper, realizing they
weren’t much use to Charlie, shut them up again, and from the drawer
where they were kept brought out games, cribbage, checkers, that he’d
seen Charlie manage in the hospital. They talked about the hospital,
and all that they had shared then, the bedpans, the crutch racing, Nurse
Muscle Eenie—Charlie laughing as Prosper remembered him doing
back then, laughter that seemed to run riot throughout him, tugging
him this way and that so that Prosper watching him laughed harder
too even as he tried to pull out of Charlie’s orbit the game board or cup
of coffee that Charlie’s limbs threatened. Upstairs May and Bea lis-
tened to the hilarity and the banging of the braces and the furniture,
taking turns rising up in alarm and starting off to go see, till pulled
back by the other.
It actually fascinated Prosper how Charlie did things, as though he
were badly adapted to do many common tasks but had figured out by
long practice how to get them done. Once in the hospital a man had
come to entertain the children, a small man in a dress suit with a little
dog. The dog could do things you wouldn’t think his paws and teeth
could manage. While the man would pretend to be about to do a magic
trick or juggle some balls, the little dog would run behind him and pull
out the hidden scarves or cards from his pockets, nose open the secret
drawers of trick boxes when the man wasn’t looking, paw out the doves
from the man’s tall hat—he could do anything, so deft and alert to
select the moment when the man’s back was turned to spoil his tricks
(though of course that was the trick), looking up with wide eyes as the
man scolded him, then doing it again, so busy and satisfied and inno-
cent. That’s how it was watching Charlie sugar his coffee, or rub his
chin questioningly, or mark his cribbage score with a pencil.
When long after dinner May called down the stairs to order them to
turn off the radio and go to bed, Charlie went to the little grip his
father had brought, worked open its catches, and pulled out a pair of
gray cotton pajamas. He got into these, and Prosper into his, each using
his own method and each making fun of the other for his contrivances.
Prosper noted the knotted muscle in Charlie’s rump and the big testi-
cles too. In the bathroom they washed their faces and brushed their
teeth, Prosper in his office chair and Charlie gripping the sink and
wrestling with the brush as though it were a small animal that had got
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 157
him. Laughing more, they climbed together into the bed, and Prosper
pulled the string he had rigged up so he could shut off the light hanging
from the ceiling.
“So good night,” Prosper said.
“Ood nigh,” said Charlie. “Own ledda bebbugs buy.”
“Don’t let the bedbugs bite. Okay, Charlie.”
“Oh gay.”
“Anything else you need?” May’d told him not to wait to be asked.
“Anything else I can help you with?”
“Oh well,” Charlie said, and began a series of twitches that might
have been shy or apologetic, and his knees pushed the bedclothes
sharply up. “I woont mine few could hep me yerp aw.”
“What?”
Charlie was laughing, in embarrassment or maybe not—that’s what
this spiraling was. “I wool like you. To hep me. YERP AW.”
Prosper thought
a moment, and got it. “Charlie! What?”
“Cmaw,” Charlie said sweetly. “Gme a hand.”
Now they were both laughing, but Charlie didn’t stop. It was appar-
ent that he meant it, and asked it as a favor. He’d kicked away the cov-
erlet, purposefully it now seemed. “Ow bowdid? Hey?”
“Well,” Prosper said. “Well all right.”
“Oh gay,” said Charlie. He now became a mass of excited ungov-
erned activity from head to foot; Prosper had to help him get his bot-
toms down. Charlie’s penis was already big, and bigger than Prosper
had expected, bigger than his own, which had got up in sympathy,
though Prosper kept his own pants on. It took a minute to figure how
to grasp the thing from a point out in front rather than behind where
he’d always been before, like trying to do something while looking
only in a mirror, they struggled this way and that before they hit a
rhythm, which Prosper now divined would be the hard part for Charlie
when alone, especially as they got going and like a caught piglet Char-
lie’s body underwent an alarming series of thrashes and wriggles at
once urgent and random, Prosper pursuing him across the bed to keep
at it. Charlie’s noises were getting louder too, though it was clear he
was trying to suppress them. His hand flew up, maybe trying to pitch
in and help, and caught Prosper a smack in the ear so that Prosper too
cried out. May from upstairs could be heard demanding quiet from the
158 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
boys just as Prosper felt Charlie swell farther, and great lashings of
stuff flew from him and across the bedsheets, Charlie nearly thrown
off the bed onto the floor by his heavings.
“Okay?” Prosper whispered, after Charlie’d grown comparatively
still.
“Oh gay,” Charlie said. “Anks a bunch.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Ooh nigh.”
“Good night, Charlie.”
Prosper telling the tale of those days to Vi in Henryville left out about
Charlie Coutts. He didn’t recount that early time with Elaine, either,
for he didn’t think these stories and what happened would count with
her. He didn’t really know why he was himself tempted to think that
indeed they did count: couldn’t have said what in them was part of that
secret tissue that had no name, only instances. Can you say you’ve
learned something if you don’t know what it is you’ve learned?
Twice or three times more Charlie came to visit ( Prosper you can’t
let Charlie drink Coca-Cola in bed. He spills, and it leaves stains on
the sheets. Brown stains. You hear? ) though somehow May and Bea
hadn’t the heart to organize a journey to Charlie’s house, a failing
they’d remember later with a little shame; and then once when Mr.
Coutts came to pick up his son, a raw November day despite which the
boys sat on the porch together (they were trying to memorize every
make and model of car there was, outguessing each other and then
arguing over which that one was, a Lincoln or a Packard), he announced
that Charlie probably wouldn’t be able to come back. Not anytime
soon anyway.
May and Bea had come out to see him—they’d taken to the quiet
man—and asked what had happened, they enjoyed Charlie’s company,
what was the matter? Well it was nothing about that; only Mr. Coutts
had at length decided it was best if Charlie went to be taken care of in
an institution, a school Mr. Coutts had learned about, in another city.
A school or home for young people like himself. It was a charity, and
there’d be no charge.
He sat down on the step beside his son.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 159
“Plymouth Roadking,” said Prosper.
“O,” said Charlie. “Chrysle a-felow.”
“No, nope son. Wasn’t a Chrysler Airflow. It was the Plymouth.”
Charlie roused, indignant, but said nothing more. No one said any-
thing for a moment. Prosper knew about it already: Charlie’d told him.
Far: that’s all he knew. He’d get training there, but he didn’t know
what kind, or for what. Prosper tried to imagine him without his gentle
father near him, and couldn’t.
“Jobs the way they are, and his mother with other kids at home,”
Mr. Coutts said, and no more.
“Well we’ll miss you, Charlie,” said May. “We’ve got used to you.”
Charlie smiled. “I’ll sen you a poscar.”
His father helped him stand, and they said good-byes all around.
Prosper wanted to do something but couldn’t think what it should be.
He had given Charlie the only thing from his father’s cases that Charlie
could manage the use of: it was a thin paper book, Drawing the Nude.
I’ll be pobular, Charlie’d said, and tucked it in his shirt.
They got into the car and Mr. Coutts fixed Charlie’s cap on his
head. Charlie flung up a hand by way of a parting wave; to them on the
porch it looked at once triumphant and desperate, but they knew it was
just his muscles.
“He’s just not made for this world,” Bea said.
“Hmp,” May said. “What’s for sure is, this world’s not made for
him.”
“Well, it’s for the best, I’m sure,” said Bea. “I’m sure it’s the best
thing.”
“Oh hush, Bea,” May said, and turned away, an awful catch in her
throat that Prosper had never heard before. “For God’s sake just
hush.”
6
Fenix Vigaron hadn’t actually predicted it, but May later could look
back over their conversations and see it figured there: just when
things seemed like they were going to get a little better—and
things had by then already got a lot better for some of us—May’s
office-supply business went quack. The owner, who’d kept it going
through the worst years of the Depression by various impostures and
financial shenanigans that caught up with him at last, shot himself in
the private washroom behind his office. May was out of a job, with no
prospect at her age of another. Turn around, turn back, said Fenix,
and one hopeless night when Bea was washing May’s hair, they both
seemed to hit on the idea at the same moment.
What they always called the side room—maybe it had once been a
sunporch or a summer kitchen but for as long as the two of them had
owned the place it had gone unused except for boxes and things wait-
ing to be fixed or thrown away—was about big enough and with work
could be made into a cozy place. It had its own door to the alley, though
nailed shut now. They’d have to invest most of their savings in plumb-
ing and carpentry and supplies; they’d start with a single chair, or two.
Bea already had a sort of following from the store, women who trusted
her advice and might take a chance on her. May’d have a lot to learn,
but she knew business and the keeping of books.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 161
So the uncles were called again—May on the phone and Bea hover-
ing nearby making urgent but ambiguous hand gestures that May
waved off like pestering flies—and in turn Mert and Fred summ
oned
from the dark pool of their connections a carpenter, a plumber, and a
painter, each appearing without warning at dawn or dusk, needing
instruction, slow mammals or needy and fearful, what debt were they
working off? One a former chemist, another with a college degree, but
it wasn’t hard in those years to find such persons displaced from their
rightful spots into whatever employment they could get. The women
followed the for-sale ads in the paper and went to bankruptcy and
going-out-of-business sales, conscious of the irony, and bought a big
hair dryer and the sinks and mirrors and other things they needed,
deciding after long thought not to acquire a used permanent-wave
machine, a gorgon arrangement of electric rods and springs and wires
such as you’d use to make the bride of Frankenstein, and anyway too
prone to disastrous mishandling, as in a dozen comic movies. They’d
offer waving and cutting, bleaching and dyeing, “consultations,” and
manicures, for the fashion now was for long long nails painted in the
deepest reds, fire engine, blood, though toenails were still done in pale
pinks or clear. Meanwhile May enrolled in a beauty school night class
to get some basics, and in the rather squalid and hopeless studio, amid
girls half her age she practiced pin waving and finger waving, the
Straight Back (and variations), the Bias Wave, the Swirl, the Saucer
Wave, the Sculpture Wave, the Windblown, and for the big night out,
the Wet Mae Murray, a tricky finger wave that May mastered, making
an effort out of fellow-feeling with poor Mae, the Hollywood castoff.
“You can teach this old dog new tricks,” she said.
Prosper was a part of this plan, the other important part, it was the
hope of solving two problems at once that had given Bea and May the
energy to carry it out. He was eighteen; without any high school and
his physical limitations, work at home was the best he could just now
aim for (“just now” was Bea’s addition to this judgment, the future
ever unknowable but dimly bright to Bea). He’d been making some-
thing with his artwork, engrossing documents and signs that said con-
gratulations or welcome home or other things, lettering price
cards for the butcher whose meat he bought; and of course he’d kept
house for the absent women, a job that now didn’t need doing.
162 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
So he’d go into business with them. He began by making the posters
