by John Crowley
of pogo stick. He took a step toward the boy, who smiled but retreated.
“Hello little fella,” he said. The boy’s mother looked down at him,
as though just then discovering him there. “What’s your name?”
The kid didn’t answer, and Mom seemed not to want to volunteer
one. “His daddy’s working out there, at the plant,” she said, still
regarding the boy, as though it was he who needed the information.
She was a rose-gold blonde, one of those whose skin seems to have
taken its shade from her hair, her brows fading almost into invisibility
against it. For a second they stood looking, her at the boy, the boy
wide-eyed at Prosper, Prosper at her.
“Was he coming out to meet you?”
“No,” she said. “He doesn’t know we’ve come.”
“Oh. Aha. Surprise visit?”
“Well.”
“What shop’s he work in? Does he live in Henryville?”
“Where’s that?” she asked in something like despair, as though sud-
denly envisioning more journeying. She looked all in.
“Just the town around the plant. The new houses. Do you have an
address?”
She didn’t answer, as though to let him guess she knew nothing at
all and would have no answer to any further question. She watched
Prosper shift his weight. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you . . .”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Listen. If you’re going out to find him, you
could come with me. My friend’s got a car. There’s room for you two.
We work out there, maybe we can give you some help finding him.”
“Oh gosh. Oh that’s so nice.”
“This way,” he said, and took a few steps under their gaze, the kid
still smiling, interested. “Or no wait. You’d have to lug the bags.
Sorry.”
“No, oh no it’s fine,” she said, reaching for what looked like a one-
ton strapped leather suitcase.
206 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“No wait here,” Prosper said. “I’m to meet him right around the
corner. Wait here and I’ll go get him and we’ll drive around. Okay?
Just wait here.”
He had just turned to set off when a wheezy beebeep behind him
turned him back. Pancho pulled up to the curb, himself beeped at by
the affronted cab behind. Prosper guided his new finds to the car with
one hand. “How’s that for luck,” he said. Pancho pulled the brake and
leapt out to help with the bag, and got the mother and child stowed in
the backseat. Prosper went around and performed his get-in-the-car
act, talking away. “So how far you two come? Where’d you start out
from?”
She named the place, Prosper astonished to hear the name of his
own northern city. They had to compare neighborhoods then, families,
schools, finding no connection.
Pancho leaned over the seat, proffered his hand and gave his name,
and Prosper’s.
“Constance,” she said in reply. “Connie. This my son Adolph.”
“Well,” Pancho said, as if in commendation. “Well let’s get going.”
“This is a good thing,” Prosper said, grinning proudly as the car
rolled off. “This is a very good thing.”
Within minutes they were outside the town and in utter darkness, stars
scattered overhead. Connie Wrobleski tasted something thick and
sweetish in the air they moved through. Crude oil, said the little man at
the wheel: you’ll get used to it. He pointed a thumb back toward where
they’d come from, and Connie saw the far-off glitter of lights and a
flare like a titanic match burning. It had turned to warm spring, nearly
summer, as she’d gone south; she opened her coat. The crippled man
smiled back at her as though glad for her. And then—Connie at first
thought it was dawn rising, though it couldn’t be that late—the great
glow of the Pax plant and hangars put out the western stars.
Three days before she’d set out with these bags and Adolph, nearly
two years old, her good suit on but flats because she knew what lay
ahead. She couldn’t face the Elevated with the bags and Adolph, and
her purse felt heavy with money from the war job she’d had, so she
called a cab.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 207
“Leaving home?” the taxi driver said, loading the bags in the
trunk—greasy Mediterranean type Connie had always mistrusted—
and in a sudden rush of careless energy she said “None of your busi-
ness,” smiled, and slammed the door with a satisfying thud; and they
went to the station in silence.
The station was packed, like the first day of a giveaway at the
department store, Connie had known it would be, the newspaper was
full of stories, people in motion. The noise of all of them as she came in
holding Adolph’s hand seemed to rise up toward the ceiling and rain
back down on them, the voices, the announcements over the loud-
speakers, the click of heels. The station was a new one, built only a few
years ago by the WPA; over the doors were stern blocky stone eagles,
and above the row of ticket windows where people patient or impatient
worked out their trips or made demands or pleas, there ran a broad
paneled painting, the history of the city and the region done in forms
of travel: Indians with those things they drag, not trapezes, and pig-
tailed men with oxcarts, larky boatmen on canal boats, a stagecoach
and an old puffer-belly locomotive, all of it pressed up together in the
picture as though it had happened all at once, as crowded with con-
trary people pushing and tugging as the station below it. Around her as
she moved slowly forward men were working the line, offering Pull-
man tickets to the South, where Connie was headed; they were asking
ten or twenty dollars above the standard price for these tickets, which
were (they said) all sold out at the window. Everybody wanted to go
south now, old people to Florida, women to the training camps where
their men were stationed. Right by the ticket window as Connie reached
it was a sign that said is this trip necessary? in stark black letters.
Like an old aunt or nun, the government making sure you weren’t
doing anything just for fun, and she wasn’t, if the government were to
ask her she could say Yes this trip is necessary.
“Ponca City, Oklahoma,” she said, or cried aloud in the din. “Coach
class. Myself and a baby, is all. One way.”
PART THREE
1
The week after Christmas Bunce Wrobleski came home from the
Bull aircraft plant with newspapers that were full of ads for
workers with skills like his—ads for workers of any kind, actu-
ally, columns and columns of them after the deserts of last
decade’s employment pages, jobs in this city and jobs far away. Situa-
tions Available. Bunce wanted a new situation. Well, that was pretty
obvious. He stood in the lamplight at midnight (couldn’t even get off
Swing Shift at this damn plant, he’d said), a Lucky dangling from his
plump sweet lower lip, his collar turned up and his cap still on at a
rakish angle with its bill sharply curled, its buttons on it—his union
button
, Blue Team button, plant admission button with his picture on
it wearing the same cap the button was pinned to; and Connie’d
thought, What a beautiful man, as she never could help thinking,
despite that foxy or wolfish cunning that was sometimes in his lashy
eyes, as it was then. He pulled off the cap and tossed it and tousled his
thick hair. The job listing he had shown her was in an aircraft plant
miles away.
The rule now was that if a man quit his war-work job to go look for
something better, or if he took some job that wasn’t war work, then his
deferment could end, even fathers wouldn’t be exempt for long. Basi-
cally he was tied to his job. That was the rule. He was the same as a
212 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
soldier, in a way; no different. At the kitchen table he had laid it out for
Connie, moving the salt and pepper shakers and the ashtray gently
around the oilcloth in relation to one another, as though they were the
elements of the contract he had accepted. Constance watched his
broken-nailed hands as he explained. His eyes weren’t meeting hers.
The salt and pepper shakers were little bisque figures of a hen and a
rooster; the rooster was the pepper.
But—Bunce explained, moving away the ashtray, opening a path
for the rooster across the flowery field of the oilcloth—but if you could
locate a different job in some other war industry plant, a job that was
rated higher than the one you had, and you had the qualifications for
it, then you could quit the one and be in no danger from the draft if
you went and took the other. The job he had here was no good. He
could do better.
“You know why I got stuck here,” he said, and only now did he
raise his eyes to Connie—she being the other piece of the rebus, she
and Adolph asleep in the next room. Sure she knew, and she wasn’t
going to look down or away from him. He could have used a safe that
night in the back of the Plymouth and they wouldn’t be stuck, but then
there’d be no Adolph either, and she wasn’t going to think that would
be a good thing.
For a time after Bunce went across the country to the new job, a
kind of stasis settled over her; it was like waiting for him to get home
from the shift but it went on all day long, and was there at night when
Adolph woke her, the sensation of Bunce not there and nothing to do
or to be until he came in, which he wasn’t going to do. She was careful
to keep herself up, for no one. She put on her makeup and a pair of the
nylons that Bunce had bought from a guy who suddenly had a lot of
pairs. She went to the hairdresser and with a ration stamp got her
bangs curled high on her head and the length in back curled too like
the bottom of a waterfall striking its pool. She did all that and at the
same time felt a strange temptation, a yen or tug, not to do it, to stop
altogether and live in the house and the bed the way Adolph did, with-
out caring or thinking.
For a few weeks the postal orders came regularly from Bunce, for
different amounts, sometimes more, sometimes less. Then a week went
by without one: it was like the sudden stopping of her heart, when it
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 213
takes that gulp of nothing, then rolls over somehow and starts again,
thumping hard and fast for a moment as though to catch up. Just that
same way a postal order came the next week, bigger than ever. But
then weeks started to pass without them.
She wrote a postcard to Bunce at the last address she had for him
and heard nothing for a while; then a letter came, with some bills
folded small and tucked into the small sheets, a five, two tens, some
ones.
Honey I’m sorry I didn’t send more lately but you can’t believe
how expensive it is out here Food costs more and every cheap
diner charges fifty cents for a plate of stew The rents are worse
when you can even get a place I was rooming with some fellows
and we got into a wrangle I’m sorry to say and I had to leave I
am doing all right now but they aren’t going to forward mail if
you wrote any, they never do from rooming houses. I hope to
come home for a while soon with any luck but you know how
the trains are. Kiss my boy for me.
So that was the rent for the month plus the five she was shy for last
month, and some food money, which wasn’t so cheap here either in
spite of all the controls they talked about. The next three weeks went
by with nothing from Bunce.
Connie Wrobleski was twenty years old and hadn’t ever faced the
prospect of nothing, no support, no surrounding provider. Kids she
knew at school had to drop out because their fathers lost their jobs, but
she hadn’t worried because her father was a bus driver for the city and
the union was good. Not even finding out she was pregnant had felt
like facing nothing, because Bunce (after he had banged on the steering
wheel of the Plymouth so long and hard she thought it would break,
making a noise behind his clenched teeth like a bad dog) promised her
it was okay and he’d never leave her, he wasn’t that kind of guy. And
anyway so many of the girls in her class at Holy Name were in the
same condition by the night of the Senior Ball, some of them showing
already and proudly wearing their rings even though the Father Super-
intendent said they were forbidden to—well if all of them were in the
same boat, and if Bunce was going to be good and already had a good
214 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
job, then it felt more like the good scary beginning of something larger
than she had ever known, something that would just go on and on and
show her what it was as it happened, like that scene in movies where
at the start you fly over hills and down roads and up to a house in a
town and through a door that opens as you come to it and into the
kitchen where a family is in the middle of their lives. This, though—
the drying up of those letters, the little flight of them failing—this felt
like having and knowing nothing at all. Adolph looked up at her and
she down into the huge pools of his eyes, and he was sure of more than
she was.
Late on the last Saturday of the month—suddenly remembering
the task with a grip to her heart—Connie got Adolph wrapped in the
red-and-white woolens and cap her mother had knitted for him, and
lifted him into the huge blue-black baby carriage for which he was
already too big, and from which he seemed likely to fling himself out
like a movie gangster from a speeding sedan. She walked the carriage
backward down the steep steps before her house (Adolph laughing at
every bump). The house was a double one, each half the mirror image
of the other, to which it was joined like a Siamese twin, two apart-
ments per house. She turned rightward up the street. Leftward went
down under the viaduct and past the millworkers’ houses and the coal
and ice dealer’s to where you caught a bus that went along the train
yards out to where the Bull plant was, the great brick buildings marked
wi
th big numbers, Number 3 where Bunce had worked. Rightward
the street went up for a while, the heavy carriage bouncing sedately
over the seams in the sidewalk, past the blackened and forbidding
Methodist church and then down, past the IGA and into a neighbor-
hood of single houses, to cross the avenue where the brown-brick
grammar school stood on its pillow of earth. On this day the ration
books for the month were given out there. You went around back,
where in the playground kids were dangling from the jungle gym wait-
ing for their mothers; Connie could feel their cold skinned knees and
barked knuckles—Bunce always said that imagining pain and discom-
fort was worse for her than the real thing when it came, which it
almost never did.
She went in the back door to the strangeness of an empty echoey
school smelling of kids and old lunches, to the cafeteria where the volun-
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 215
teers were handing out booklets and checking names. Most of the volun-
teers were teachers at the school, and since Connie didn’t have a child at
the school they didn’t know her. She carried Adolph in her arms, he was
scared to get down and walk, and of course all the women wanted a
look at him and smiled and asked Connie what his name was.
“Adolph?” said a man behind her in line. “There’s a heck of a name
to lay on a kid.”
“It’s his grandfather’s name,” Connie said, looking straight ahead,
thinking maybe that made it worse.
“Is he a German?”
“It’s a fine name,” said the woman behind the scarred table. A
wooden box filled with stamp books was beside her.
“It was a fine name a couple of years ago,” Connie said. “When he
got it.”
“Well sure. Like Adolphe Menjou.” Connie handed her the ragged
and empty remains of the old book—you couldn’t get a new one with-
out handing in the old—and was given her book of rough gray paper
and a sheet of printed reminders and notices for the month, which she
would sit down later and try to master.
At the door where the people who had been given their books went
out, a man in a sleeveless sweater and a bedraggled bow tie stood by a
folding table. A sandwich board was open beside it. It showed four
women’s faces in profile, almost identical but receding into the dis-
