Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  to be put up on the telephone poles around the neighborhood, and the

  little ad they placed after much thought in the evening paper—“Bring

  out your BEST and do it for LESS.” He made their sign too—an old

  cupboard door lovingly enameled and varnished.

  “May, look at this! This boy’s a genius! So artistic!”

  The Mayflower was the name they had chosen, arching over a some-

  what emblematic flower and its visiting bee, a notion of Fenix Vigaron’s.

  Beauty Salon with a dot between each letter and the next, elongating

  the phrase elegantly, and an arrow pointing down to the door in the

  alley, opened now and painted.

  “Our shingle,” May said and laughed. They hung it up on the house

  corner, and toasted it and themselves with a ruby glass of schnapps.

  The shop began to do business, but only after a month or so of wait-

  ing, Bea and May dressed and ready every morning like hosts in that

  anxious hour when it seems no guests at all will show up. There were a

  couple of early mistakes, money refunded, free services offered in com-

  pensation and indignantly refused—Bea and May in the withering gaze

  of an enraged matron, Bea offering soothe and May ready to give the

  old bat an earful but smiling on. Bea’s skills and generous approbation

  brought women back and back, and others were drawn in by May’s

  hints of her connections beyond this plane of existence (she tried hard

  not to make too much of this, but the stories she heard as women soaked

  their nails in soapy water or sat beneath the penitential dryer were too

  intriguing not to report to her spirit guide; May delivered Fenix’s gnomic

  responses to the women but refused to explicate them, which only made

  May seem the more privy to secret wisdom). Things got pretty busy.

  “Prosper,” Bea said to him as she cleaned the shop at day’s end.

  “Yes.” He looked up from the old copy of The Sunny Side he was

  reading. The Sunny Side was the official publication of the American

  Optimists Association. Bea took the magazine, read it faithfully, and

  they piled old copies here for clients. Bea was an Optimist.

  “We’re thinking,” Bea said, “that you can be more help in the

  shop.”

  “Sure,” Prosper said. He closed the picture-less little magazine. The

  motto of the AOA, printed beneath the title, was Every day, in every

  way, I’m getting better and better. Émile Coué.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 163

  “There’s things you can’t do,” Bea said, standing tiptoe to lower

  and lock the transom. “But also things you can.”

  “Sure,” said Prosper. He straightened up, ready for his orders. What

  could he do? Well, he could answer the phone and keep the appoint-

  ments book, he could greet the customers as they arrived, keep things

  orderly, just anything. Maybe—who knew—he could learn a bit of the

  business, washing hair or similar. Lots of men did such work, the best

  paid were men in fact, she could tell him.

  “But now I have to tell you,” Bea said, tidying and fussing with her

  back to him for so long that Prosper understood it was easier to say her

  piece without facing him. “You’ll have to look nice. A nice clean shirt

  and a tie. You’ll have to shave, you know, every day, and maybe a little

  talcum. Tooth powder. I know the bath’s not easy for you, but.” Now

  at last she did turn to him, beaming. “We’ll be so proud to have you!

  Really!”

  He could only beam back. He was possessed by the ticklish feeling of

  having been seen, of understanding that he could be seen by others, who

  passed certain judgments or came to certain opinions about him because

  they saw not the inside of himself that he saw but the outside, where the

  face he couldn’t see and the smells of himself and the smuts and the

  wrinkles on him (that he inside could always account for or discount)

  came first, first and foremost. He remembered his father at the nightly

  labor of polishing his narrow shoes, instructing Prosper that one day

  he’d know how important it was, and why. Bring out your best.

  “All right,” he said.

  From that day forward he did take an interest in himself, studying

  the image in the mirror, not only the plastered hair and knotted tie (the

  knot his own invention, as there was no one to instruct him in the

  four-in-hand) but also the odd attraction in his own green eyes, a ques-

  tion with no answer passing back and forth from him to it. Every day,

  in every way, I’m getting better and better, he’d say softly. Bea was

  astonished at the change, his going from indifference to punctilious

  attention, but it was only that he hadn’t known, no one had explained

  to him you could take yourself in hand this way, as though you were a

  pot to be polished or a garden to be weeded.

  He delighted in the shop, the women who came and went; he greeted

  each by name and made some remark pertinent to her, asked about her

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  poodle or her daughter in business school or her ailing husband. They

  lost one or two customers repelled by Prosper’s clattering around the

  shop still painfully bent, but he won the loyalty of others. His lacks

  and inabilities made them want to mother him, no surprise really, espe-

  cially when they learned he had no real mother, was actually an

  Orphan: but the same lacks and inabilities somehow allowed them to

  be themselves in his presence, as they were in the shop with May and

  Bea but weren’t with other men (he saw how they could change when,

  as now and then happened, a husband poked his head into the shop to

  pick one of them up—they’d switch in a moment to a guarded, prac-

  ticed manner, even if it was a seemingly childish or dizzy one. And

  only he knew). He listened to their stories just as Bea and May did, and

  listened to the wisdom his aunts dispensed. He saw tears, more than

  once; overheard a shocking cynicism too. He gets nothing from me in

  that bed but once a month. And he’d better make it worth my while,

  I’m telling you.

  He supplemented what he learned with his reading, after May began

  stocking old copies of True Story magazine she got from a younger

  cousin. When the shop was quiet and his tasks done, Prosper sat by the

  extension phone and read them. I Married a Dictator. Aren’t there

  limits to what a woman will stand, even for such a mad infatuation as

  hers? The big pulp pages were a cyclopedia of female life, from which

  he learned of the whelming strength of women’s fears and desires, the

  immensity of their sacrifices, the crimes they were capable of. They ran

  away from tyrannical preacher fathers, abased themselves in dime-a-

  dance halls and speakeasies, took awful vengeance on betraying lovers

  or pertinacious rivals, and always despite repression and abuse their

  honest need and goodness shone through. They went out on their own

  when Father died and the pension stopped, they worked hard amid dan-

  gers and pestering men, they fell for one night of passion with a man

  who seemed so clean and kind, only to find he’s fronting for a sex

&n
bsp; exchange club! They escaped, they hid out, they made their own way,

  they met a man not like other men, they found love or at least wisdom.

  Sadder but wiser, or happy at last. He learned a lot from the ads too,

  about the clever counterfeits of underwear and makeup, and also the

  unnameable ills and pains that perhaps his mother had suffered, that

  any woman might and men never did. For those special women’s

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 165

  hygiene needs—be SURE with ZONITOR, whatever that was, the

  woman’s lined brow and worried eyes erased and smooth again.

  The men in the stories were good but simple, or they were ignoble

  clods, or if they were smart they were only smart about cheating and

  lying; unlike the women they had desires and schemes and pride and

  even sturdy sense but no insides. No wonder the women lost them or

  lost faith in them or settled for them when they knew in their hearts it

  was wrong. If she confided EVERYTHING in him, would he still love

  her? How could she be sure? It seemed that the way to win the esteem

  of women was to become as like one as he could: as trusting, as unsoiled

  deep down, as wholehearted.

  “Ha,” Vi said to Prosper in Henryville. “I don’t know how you

  could think that way about women. You were around them so much.

  Anybody who’s around them that much’d have to find out pretty soon

  they’re no better than men in most ways, and some ways worse.”

  “I don’t know,” Prosper said. “I just preferred them.”

  Vi shook her head over him. “It was those nice old Lizzies you lived

  with,” she said. “You got the wrong idea.”

  “That’s what my uncles thought,” Prosper said.

  “Prosper,” said May to him one evening when the shop had closed, “it

  seems to me your hair’s getting a little shaggy. Maybe it’s time to give

  you a trim.”

  “Really?” said Prosper.

  When he was a boy Bea and May had gone with him once to the

  barbershop down on the avenue, and at the door had sent him inside

  with two bits in his hand, but the vast glossy chairs and the row of

  white-coated unwelcoming men had defeated him—he’d have to ask

  for help to get into a chair, and then to get down again, and the barbers

  seemed unlikely to offer that help, though since he didn’t dare to ask,

  he’d never know: anyway he turned around and came back out again,

  and went home with Bea and May, and they’d made do thereafter with

  scissors.

  Now, though, they had a little more expertise.

  “Maybe,” Bea said, teasing, her hand pushing Prosper’s hair this

  way and that, as though he were any client, “maybe you need a little

  166 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  something. You’re a good-looking fellow, you know. You could look

  better.”

  Prosper laughed, embarrassed and alert, pleased too.

  “Sure,” May said. “Why not. Just a little soft wave. You know, like

  Rudy Vallee. Or who’s that English fellow, Leslie Howard.” With a

  motion of her hand she indicated that nice shy way his blond curls fell

  over his forehead, the way he pushed them back and they fell again.

  “Sure. Bea, fire up the dryer.”

  They wrapped a towel around him, laid his head back in the basin,

  and when the water was warm May washed his hair, delightful submis-

  sion-inducing sensation of her strong fingers in his scalp. The two

  women argued over which of them would do the cut and wave, and

  finally took turns, each criticizing the other’s work and laughing at

  Prosper’s fatuous and ceaseless grin. They had him all pinned and ready

  to be put under the great bonnet of the dryer when there was a loud rap

  at the door, more like the cops than any belated client; they all started.

  Parting the little curtain that hung over the window of the door,

  May murmured “Oh my stars,” and opened the door. Mert came in,

  more as though exiting a familiar house and stepping into a cold and

  dangerous street than the reverse. “Hi, May, hi, I,” he said, and

  stopped, catching sight of Prosper. Fred, coming in behind him, looked

  in over his shoulder.

  “Hi, Uncle Mert,” Prosper said.

  “Jeez, May, what the hell,” Mert said.

  “Now, Mert,” Bea said.

  “What are you doing to this boy?”

  “We’re making him look nice. Anybody can look nice.”

  “Almost anybody,” May said coldly, narrowing her eyes at Mert.

  “Man oh man,” said grinning Fred. “Will you get a load of this.”

  “Shut up,” Mert said without ceasing to study Prosper. “This is just

  what I was afraid of. You two trying to raise a man.”

  “You button your lip,” May said. She crossed her arms before her.

  “As if you could have done it.”

  “Well just look at him,” Mert said. “Jeez.” He came closer to where

  Prosper sat unmoving, still grinning like Joe E. Brown but now from a

  different impulse. “Just because he’s a cripple he don’t have to be a

  sissy.”

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 167

  “And where’ve you been the last seven years?” May said. Her foot

  was tapping the floor, her arms still crossed.

  “Well starting now,” Mert said. “He just needs a chance.”

  “Well then,” Bea said gently, “you might start by saying hello.”

  And Prosper saw his uncle’s face suffused with a dramatic blush that

  rose from thick neck to forehead, the first adult he’d ever seen so taken,

  which was a thing of great interest; and then he put a big hand out to

  Prosper, who had to fumble his own right hand from under the towel

  to take it.

  “Anyway we ought to finish up,” Bea said. “Before those pins come

  loose.”

  The icehouse, where the disreputables that Bea and May had refused to

  describe to Prosper gathered, was over on the West Side, past the rail-

  road tracks and in fact in another township, which made an important

  legal difference, even though no one much remembered the fact or even

  the name of that vanished village. It was close enough to what had

  once upon a time been a lake in the woods that ice could be cut and

  sledded there easily. Now the ice was made on the spot in a long shed

  where the big Westinghouse electric engines ran the belts of an ammo-

  nia condenser, but it was stored, covered in straw, down in the same

  old brick underground, breathing cold breath like a cave’s mouth out

  to the office and the street. Since the way down into it had been built

  when oxen were used to slide the ice in and out in great blocks, it went

  sloping at a shallow angle: Prosper loved to walk down that way into

  the cool silence.

  The front offices where Mert and Fred ran the ice business, and sold

  coal and fuel oil as well when and if they could spare the time from

  other enterprises, were a rich habitation—tin ceilings darkened with

  cigar smoke, girlie calendars, spiked orders growing yellow with age,

  freshly cracked decks of cards, ringing phones Mert talked into two at

  a time even while calling for Fred to deal with this or that matter.

  Whatever matter it was that Mert and Fred ha
d come to talk to May

  and Bea about had gone no further that night; the men went away with

  a mission, to take (as Mert said) the boy in hand, and teach him a few

  things; and Prosper’s world widened. Later on he’d think that May and

  168 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  Bea must have felt abandoned by him, and must have resented if not

  hated it that he’d taken up with the icehouse gang, and he’d feel shame,

  but not then: too much that was new and gratifying came his way, and

  more lay just beyond envisioning. He started smoking, not Mert’s

  Dutch Masters or Muniemakers but the more fastidious cigarette,

  though he found it hard to smoke and walk at the same time, and even-

  tually mostly gave it up; he grew a mustache, a thin dark line above his

  lip like Ronald Colman’s. The uncles gave him instruction in the arts

  of shaking hands and looking a man in the eye, what honor required

  you to do and what (they thought) it didn’t, what was owed to friends

  and how to look out for Number One at the same time. They made

  over his clothes: dressed him not as they themselves dressed, though

  they got a tailor to make him a good suit, but as the young blades

  nowadays dressed: sport coats of houndstooth or herringbone collared

  like shirts rather than lapelled, pastel shirts worn with hand-painted

  silk foulards or without a tie, long collar points laid over the jacket.

  Trousers richly pleated and draped—Prosper’s braces disappeared

  beneath them rather than poking everywhere through the fabric like a

  bony beast’s joints. He studied himself in the mirror, considering how

  his new pale wide fedora should lie, back like Bing’s or Hoagy’s, or

  forward and nearly hiding an eye, mystery man or secret agent, pinch

  the front indents to lift it to a lady. Not much could be done with his

  shoes, to which the braces were bolted across the instep, but no reason

  he couldn’t wear silk socks in argyle patterns or clocked with roses;

  Prosper, lifting the knees of his cheviot bags to sit, could glimpse them,

  pretty secrets revealed.

  They kidded him too about what else they might do for him, take

  him out to the suburbs to a certain place, or downtown to one, get his

  cherry picked or his ashes hauled, saying it maybe only to laugh at the

  face he made—wide-eyed, that grin he was given to that they couldn’t