Four Freedoms

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.

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  “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.