by John Crowley
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 183
“You think I’m not behind the war effort?” Mert asked Prosper. “Is
that it? You know I fought for this country? Same as your dad. I can
show you my medals. Good Conduct.”
“Ha ha,” said Fred.
“It’s not that,” Prosper said.
“You don’t think you can do it? That’s what I need to know.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But I don’t want to.”
Mert turned away to gaze out the somewhat clouded window of the
office (he liked it clouded) and put his fists on his hips. “Hell of a
note,” he said, sounding wounded. “Well. Hell with it. Let’s knock off
for the day.”
More or less in silence, they closed the office: called out good nights
and instructions to the night people, rang up the ice shed on the house
telephone (Mert cranking the magneto with what seemed fury to Pros-
per) and told them the office was locking up, finally turning the sign in
the glass of the door from open to closed.
Not much was said during the ride back to downtown. Finally Mert
threw his arm over the seat and looked back at Prosper. “You can have
it your way, son,” he said. “But I’ll just tell you something. There might
not be any other work for you around the place. If you can’t do this.”
Stony-faced. Prosper tried to cast his own face in stone.
“Just think about it,” Fred said into the rearview mirror.
“He’s thought about it,” Mert said, still regarding Prosper. “So
where can we drop you?”
“Um.” He didn’t want to go back to the Mayflower Beauty Salon,
but he didn’t want to be too far from home either. “Drop me at the
Paramount,” he said.
“Going to the movies?” Mert said. “Man of leisure?”
That required a dignified silence.
“What’s playing?” Fred asked.
“Dunno.”
They turned on Main. The theater was a ways from Bea and May’s,
but Prosper’d done it before. Late on a winter afternoon and no one
much going in. Fred let the car idle there—no one would be doing
much of that from then on. The marquee advertised No Room at the
Inn along with The Invisible Agent, newsreels and Selected Short
Subjects.
184 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“You’re a good kid, Prosper,” Mert said. He pulled out a money clip
and plucked a couple of bills from it, then one more. “You do what you
think you got to.”
Prosper shook Mert’s hand, then reached over and shook Fred’s. He
got out of the car with the usual clatter of braces and crutches. Hadn’t
they themselves, his uncles, taught him what Honor required? Wasn’t
it this? And what the heck was he going to do now to make money?
The second feature was just beginning when he entered into that
soothing darkness, violet hued, lit by the shifting scenes bright and
dim. He paused at the top of the long flight of broad steps—easy
enough to manage but not if you couldn’t see them; the usher, silhou-
etted against the huge heads on the screen, was showing someone to a
seat, momentary ghost of a flashlight pointed discreetly downward.
Prosper waited for him to come back up and light his way.
But it wasn’t a him—it was an usherette, as they were called, women
and girls taking the jobs of drafted boys, solemn in her big dark uni-
form. Tumble of black curls beneath her cap. She turned on the dim
flashlight and was about to walk him down when he stepped forward,
Swing Gait, and she halted: then, surely a breach of the usher’s code,
she lifted the light right up to his face.
“Prosper?” she whispered.
Blinded, he still knew whose voice he’d heard. The soft dry burr of
it. She lowered the lamp, but he stood dazzled. She touched his arm
and turned him away from the screen and back out toward the foyer.
“Prosper,” she said again when they were in the light.
“Hi, Elaine.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
She gazed upon him. “I haven’t seen you.”
“I’m around. The same place.”
“I moved out,” she said. “Things happened. I have a room.”
“Okay.”
“Who did that to your hair?”
“What? Oh.”
That face, the eyebrows lifting in a worried query that she seemed
already to know the sad answer to—Is it mortal? Will we never
return? Is all lost?—when she wasn’t actually asking anything and
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 185
wasn’t sad. “Listen,” she said. “I get off in an hour. Sit in the back.
I’ll see you then.”
As though they’d agreed to this a long time ago. That was the sign,
he was as yet unused to noticing it but he was learning: that sensation
that the future has already happened and is only bringing itself about
in staging these present moments.
He went back in and sat down. He lit a cigarette, after determining
that a little ashtray was attached to the seat in front of him: one thing
hard for him was stamping out a burning end from a seated position.
The picture was well under way now. The grandson of the original
Invisible Man had inherited his grandfather’s secret formula, and the
Nazis and the Japs were teamed up to steal it. The Invisible Agent pes-
ters and pulls funny tricks on the bad guys; the audience watched in
silence. It occurred to Prosper that the Agent must be damn cold—only
without his clothes was he altogether invisible.
Elaine went past the row where he sat, a woman and a man in tow.
An invisible woman, that would be an idea for a picture. Naked,
and you’d know it, but you’d see nothing.
He thought of Elaine, in his braces, on the floor of his aunts’ house.
Exchange of selves, his for hers, why would she have wanted that? And
why his? However many eyes there were on him every day as he did
this or that, walked a block, took a stool in a diner, went through a
door, he often felt himself to be invisible. Like the Invisible Agent:
people could see the suit and hat and gloves, and nothing of what was
inside them. No matter that they stared.
He felt her slide into the seat behind him. “I’m off,” she whispered,
leaning over. “Come with me. I have to change.”
Making as little noise as he could, he stood and left the row to
follow her; the few in adjoining rows glancing up with interest, maybe
one or two thinking he was being expelled, no cripples allowed. He
went after her into the foyer and around to the far side and through a
door that seemed to be just part of the wall. It opened to a hot shabby
corridor lit by bare bulbs. Dim hollow voices of the picture could be
heard . I pity the Devil when you Nazis start arriving in bunches!
“Here,” she said.
It was a dressing room, a couple of blank lockers, a sink, a clothes
rack of pipe where uniforms hung. Steam hissed from the radiator. She
186 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
turned her back to him to take out the stud from her collar, then pulled
the whole celluloid shirtfront with collar and tie attached out
from her
uniform jacket and tossed it down on a bench.
“Elaine,” he said, and she turned to him; he could see that she’d
worn nothing beneath the dickie, too hot maybe. As though he’d said
much more than her name she came to him, and he knew it was time to
put his arms around her, but that was hard; propping himself with one
crutch he wrapped her in the other arm, still holding its crutch. She
somehow melted into him anyway, partly supporting him, breasts soft
against him. Then she seemed not to know what came next, forgetting
or unable to predict, and she drew away, undoing the frogs of her uni-
form coat.
“Turn around,” she said, and he did; when after a time he turned
back he found she had put on a shirtwaist dress, was barelegged in
white anklets, and he felt a piercing loss. She put on a dark thick coat
and a shapeless hat. “We’ll go out the back.”
She took him out around the back of the stage, and for a moment
Prosper could see that the great screen was actually translucent, and
the picture of two lovers projected on the front shone through to be
seen, reversed, by no one.
They came out into the alley, scaring a lean cat from a garbage pail.
She lived many blocks away, in the opposite direction from Bea and
May’s. They didn’t speak much as they walked, just enough so as not to
appear strange to each other marching in urgent silence toward what-
ever it was, but what little from their shared past they might have spoken
about ought not to be said now: that was obvious to both of them.
“So what happens to the Jap? In that picture.”
“He commits Harry Carey.”
“Oh.”
Though the cold air burned his throat, he was wet with sweat
beneath his coat by the time she said “Here.” The place was heart-
sinkingly tall, a long pile of stairs with steeper than normal risers that
climbed as though up a castle wall to a front door high above. He
despaired. But Elaine then took him through a side gate (beware of
the dog) and around to the back, a short winter-dry yard where an
umbrella clothesline leaned like a blasted tree, and into a door. “Up,”
she said softly. “Don’t be loud.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 187
It was only a half-flight, though the banister was flimsy and the
steps mismatched. How her room was fitted onto or into the house in
front never came clear to him, though he tried later to draw a plan.
The door at the top of the stairs led into a minute kitchen no bigger
than a closet, and that to a bedroom. Elaine pulled a chain that lit a
green-shaded lamp above the dark bed.
She turned to him then. He was breathing hard from exertion, and
she seemed to be also, her mouth a little open and her face lifted to his.
Her eyes huge and certain. He would come to learn—he was learning
already—that these moments, different as each one was from all the
others, were all more like one another than they were like any in the
rest of his life: they were like the moment in some movies when a scene
changes in an instant from black and white into color, and everything
is the same but now this picture has become one of those rare ones that
are colored, it joins that richer life, and for a time you live in it, until
the gray real world comes back again.
Night. Negotiating in the dark the way out of her room and down the
half flight of treacherous stairs holding the splintery banister, knowing
there were things—tools, trash, boxes, a cat—he couldn’t see. He
bumped at length into the door outward, and pushed it open (beware
of that dog) and made it out to the street. He saw at the block’s end the
cigar store right where he remembered it being, where there would be a
telephone. Mert’s bills in his pocket, enough for a while, but not for
taxis every day. He felt a sudden anguish, he wanted to turn back now
and climb those stairs again, there was something left undone there or
not completed, it twisted within him painfully in the direction of her
room even as he pushed himself down the block: something he’d never
felt before, and seeming to be installed deeply now.
Why was she the way she was? Women with their clothes on could
be utterly unlike themselves when they were without them, even those
who were unwilling to take all or even most of them off, who made
him paw through the folds of fabric like an actor fumbling through a
stage curtain to come out and say something important. But none so
far had been as different as Elaine. She’d lain still as he unbuttoned her
buttons and his, mewing a little softly, a mewing that grew stronger
188 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
when he’d got her last garments off, hard to do with no help at all. She
lay still and naked then making that sound, as though something
dreadful were about to happen to her that she was powerless to resist;
she closed her eyes while he unbuckled his braces, she covered her eyes
even for a moment with her hands, and then remained still, tense as a
strung wire, while he attended to her. He tried to speak, tell her they
had to be you know careful, but she wouldn’t listen, drew him over
atop her, parting her legs and pressing him down. But once he had
gone in—swallowed up almost by the enveloping hot wetness—she
held him still so he wouldn’t move, made sounds of protest if he tried,
almost as though he hurt her, and herself lay unmoving too except for
small tremors that racked her, seemingly unwanted. He almost whis-
pered Hey what the heck Elaine to make her behave in some more
familiar way but actually could say nothing, and after what seemed a
very long time she lifted her legs and circled him tightly; she murmured
something as though to herself, a word or two, and he felt a sudden
sensation of being grabbed or enveloped from within as by a hand. It
was so startling and unlikely that he nearly withdrew, and did cry out,
and so did she, even as he was held and ejaculating. And at that she
began pushing him out and away, gently and then more forcefully;
when he was separated she rolled over so that she faced away from
him, and pulled the coverlet over herself.
Elaine? he’d said.
All right, she’d said, not turning back. Go away now, she’d said. I’ll
see you maybe at the theater tomorrow.
So.
He guessed that if she’d got herself knocked up today he’d have to
marry her. The cab he called rolled up to the door of the cigar store
where he stood next to a dour wooden Indian, and Prosper checked to
see if it was driven by that same old fool who’d once mocked him, but
of course it wasn’t. He’d marry her and somehow they’d live, maybe in
that tiny room. For an instant he knew it would be so and that he
wanted nothing more, and how could that be? How could it?
8
Without his uncles’ wages and the odd bill they’d slip him for
this or that ser vice, Prosper was back in the Mayflower, but
May and Bea couldn’t give him the money he needed if he
was going to be seeing Ela
ine: though she seemed to want
nothing from him, that only made him think she really did. So he went
to work for The Light in the Woods. They needed people. He didn’t
have much of a choice. At least it appeared he wouldn’t have to support
a wife and child: after an uneasy week (he was uneasy, she seemed
somehow bleakly indifferent) he knew that.
The Light in the Woods (Prosper’d first heard about it from Mary
Mack, and then from the teacher of his special class at school) had for
years been giving work to people with impairments who couldn’t com-
pete for jobs with other workers. They were blind or almost blind, they
were deaf or crippled or untrainable, they were spastics or aged alkies
with tremors. They were put to work making simple things like coco
matting or brushes, or they picked up and refurbished discarded cloth-
ing or toys or furniture for resale, packed boxes or did contract labor
assembling things for local factories—anything that almost anybody
could do but nobody could make a living doing. For years The Light in
the Woods had been losing work: in the Depression, standards had
changed about what jobs an able-bodied person would willingly do.
190 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Supported by charitable giving, they’d kept their workers on through
those years, guaranteeing them their fifty cents a day even when there
wasn’t much to do. Now business was booming again: there were sud-
denly lots of jobs that nobody would do who could do anything else. A
new age of junk had dawned; shortages of materials for war industries
meant we were constantly urged to save them, bring them to collection
centers for reuse and reclamation—rubber and scrap metal and fats
and tin cans (wash off the labels, cut off both ends and smash them
flat). Old silk stockings could be made into parachutes; new ones soon
became unavailable. Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without. In
Prosper’s city the collection and sorting of discards and donated matter
was contracted out to The Light in the Woods, and the outfit opened a
larger warehouse in the industrial district to handle it all. When Pros-
per made the trip downtown to the War Mobilization Employment
Office, that’s where he was sent. All he had to do was sign up for the
special bus service that The Light in the Woods had arranged to circle
the city and bring in their people who couldn’t get there on their own.
