Four Freedoms
Page 32
to payroll for severance.”
She had no gear. He had moved on before she could speak. The
union man, looking harried and put-upon—his wiry hair springing in
exasperation from his temples—gave her a numbered chit and told her
to hand it in with her time card. Connie opened her mouth to speak.
“Bankruptcy,” said the union man. “Receivership. The jig’s up. Go
home. Apply tomorrow at the union office for unemployment compen-
sation forms.” One of the other men took his arm and drew him along.
Workers were leaving their places and falling in behind them. The
union man began walking backward like an usher at the movies, trying
to answer questions. Connie could hear the big thuds of electric motors
being shut down.
She followed the crowd. She thought it was a good thing that the
union steward stood between the workers and the officers and manag-
ers who strode forward carrying their news; some of the people were
angry and shouting, women were crying; some seemed unsurprised,
they’d known it all along, mismanagement, big shots, profiteers. It felt
like a march, a protest. At the juncture where you turned off to the
cafeteria and the coatrooms and the exit, the crowd parted, some to go
out and others, querulous or angry, still in pursuit of the closed-faced
officers.
Connie turned back against the traffic.
She went, begging pardon, through the people and back down the
now near-empty factory. A glimmer of dust that seemed to have been
stirred up by the upheaval stood in the haloes of the big overhead lights.
Connie went down the stairs and along the passage to the Number 3
building, where she had first been examined and tested. Once there—
after a wrong turn into a wing of offices where more harried people
were emptying file drawers and piling up folders, who looked up in
suspicion to see her—she found the yellow line painted on the floor
and followed it back toward the intake rooms. At first there seemed no
238 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
one there at all, the nurse’s station closed and the X-ray machine
hooded in black, but in the room where tests were given she found the
gray man in the gray cloth coat who had administered the Manual
Dexterity and Visual Acuity Test. He was sitting on a table, a coffee
mug beside him, swinging his legs like a child.
“Hello,” she said.
He looked up, weary, maybe sad. She suddenly felt sorry for him.
“I wonder,” she said. “If I could get back my test.”
He said nothing; lifting his eyebrows seemed all he had the strength
to do.
“I took a test when I came here. A month ago, or really five weeks.
I . . . You said I did well. Visual Acuity. My name is Constance
Wrobleski. I would like to have that test. Or a copy if you have one.”
He seemed to remember, or maybe not, but he let himself down
gingerly off the table—his socks fallen around his white ankles were
dispiriting—and motioning to Connie to follow him he went back the
way Connie had come. She wanted to say something, that she was
sorry about the plant and the Bull, and would it be opening again later,
and what would become of him now, but all these seemed like the
wrong thing. At a turning he led her into those offices where she had
earlier found herself by mistake. Now a woman had lowered her head
onto her desk and apparently was weeping; no one paid attention to
her, only kept on with what they were doing, which seemed at once
pointless and urgent to Connie.
The man she followed was oblivious to all this, only went on stooped
and purposeful as though this were a day like any other, moving along
a rank of tall filing cabinets until he found the drawer he wanted;
clicked its catch and slid it open on its greased tracks; fingered through
the papers within, by their upstanding tabs; stopped, went back a few,
and pulled out a paper, which he looked at up and down to make sure
it was what he thought it was. It was a plain white form with the name
of the test on it and her name and employee number. It listed the tests
she’d taken, with a blue check next to each, and at the bottom a row of
boxes to check, labeled Below Normal, Normal, Above Normal, Supe-
rior. Hers was checked in the Superior box.
“All yours,” he said.
“You sure you don’t need it?” she asked.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 239
He laughed gently. “I certainly don’t,” he said. “You take that and
go on. Find something else. You can help. You ought to.”
It was after two by the time Connie got off one of the crowded buses
that were carrying away all the laid-off Bull workers. She’d been given
ten days’ severance pay but she hadn’t worked long enough to get any
unemployment compensation; there was, she was told, always welfare.
The no-strike agreement the unions had all made with the government
meant they wouldn’t or couldn’t stand up for the workers and get any
better deal; things just had to go on as fast as they could, everybody
dispersed to look for work elsewhere. Maybe the Bull works would be
reorganized and reopen, maybe not, but you couldn’t wait.
When she got to her building she realized that at this hour Mrs.
Freundlich wouldn’t be waiting for her with Adolph; she pressed the
electric doorbell, but it didn’t seem to be working, and she opened the
door and went up. Just as she reached the apartment door it was flung
open, Mrs. Freundlich red-faced and with an expression Connie
couldn’t name, shock or fear or guilt or.
“I’m off early,” Connie said. She didn’t feel like explaining. “I’ll
take Adolph now, all right?”
The woman glanced behind herself, as though she’d heard some-
thing that way. And back at Connie.
“You’ll get the whole day’s pay,” Connie said.
Mrs. Freundlich turned from the door and marched away with a
heavy tread that Connie realized she’d often heard without knowing
what it was. She followed, across the worn Turkey carpet and the hulk-
ing mahogany table and sideboard—who brought such stuff into an
apartment?—and into a bedroom. Adolph wasn’t there, but on the
steam radiator a pair of his pants was laid to dry.
“Oh dear,” said Connie. “Oh no.”
Without a word—she hadn’t spoken one yet—Mrs. Freundlich
opened the closet door. At first Connie couldn’t see into the dark space,
or was so unready for what was in there that she misread it. Adolph.
Adolph had been put there, in the dark, amid the old lady’s coats and
dresses and shoes, on a little stool, and shut in. He looked like a culprit,
eyes wide, holding his hands together as he did when he was frightened.
240 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Wouldn’t mind,” said Mrs. Freundlich. “I warned him. Warned
you too.”
“Oh my God my baby!” Connie reached with both hands into the
closet and lifted Adolph out. Now he was crying, crying Mommy into
her ear in awful gladness and clinging hard around her neck. “How
long has he been in there?�
�� Connie said to Mrs. Freundlich. “How
could you do that, how could you,” she cried, even as she bore the
child out of the bedroom and out of the apartment as though from a
fire. “You awful woman!”
“Serves him right,” said Mrs. Freundlich, tramping after her, still
red-faced and defiant. “All’s I can say.”
Connie pushed past her and out the door.
“You’ll want his trousers,” the old woman called after her.
Back in her own kitchen Connie decided that the best thing to do
was never to speak to Adolph about what had happened in that place,
never, and just love her son and teach him he was a good good boy and
he didn’t need to be afraid of anybody or anything. She told him so
now, even as she tried to get him to loosen his hold on her; she could
feel his heart beating against her.
“You’re a good boy,” she said. “A good boy.”
In another part of her heart and mind she was making calculations,
counting money she had and money she could get. She kept thinking
and counting while Adolph napped in the bed beside her—unwilling to
let her go, his big blond head buried in her side. When he awoke and
after he ate, Connie pulled out his potty from where it was kept behind
the bathroom door.
“I don’t want to, Mommy,” he said, regarding it with something
like alarm, its white basin, its decals of rabbit and kitty.
“It’s okay,” Connie said. “Just try.”
He hung back. Connie at last knelt before him, bringing her face
right before his. “Okay, honey,” she said. “Listen. We have to go on a
trip. You and me. Okay? On a train. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“We’re going to go find your daddy. Okay?”
“Okay.”
It occurred to Connie that sons had to love their fathers, but that if
you were two years old and had never lived a human life before, you
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 241
might not think it was strange to have your father leave. You wouldn’t
think anything was strange; you wouldn’t know. You’d know well
enough what you wanted and what you didn’t, though.
“So you have to learn,” she said, holding his shoulders in her hands.
“To go in the potty. So we can travel, ride on the train. Okay?”
Of this he was less sure. He said nothing.
“Two weeks,” Connie said. It would take her that long to close up
the apartment, tell her parents and Bunce’s parents, a hot wave of
shame and foreboding at that thought, but this first, nothing without
this. She held up a V of fingers before him. “That’s how long you have,
till we leave. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay!”
He was laughing now, and she started to laugh too. It was true and
it was urgent, but it was funny too. “Two. Weeks,” she said again.
“You bunny.”
3
They stretched the rules at the Van Damme dormitory in Henryville
to let her have a space, because no children were allowed; it didn’t
seem to Connie that it was the first time the women at the desk
had stretched the rules, or that the rules were all that important
to them. They only needed to know that Adolph was toilet trained, and
Connie could say Yes. Not a single accident since far to the north on the
Katy Line, too late a warning, too long a line at the smelly toilet. Actu-
ally he’d got used to facilities of several kinds—rows of station toilets
with clanging steel doors, overused toilets like squalid privies in crowded
coaches; old Negro porters helped him, soldiers too, hey give the little
kid a break. Once in a train so filled with soldiers and sailors it was
impossible to move, they’d passed him hand to hand over the heads of
the passengers till the far end of the coach was reached—he’d been game
even for that, seeming to get braver and more ready for things with
every mile. Now and then he’d whined and wept, and once worked up a
nice tantrum, as though the new self coming out hurt like teething: but
Connie’d have worried for him if he hadn’t had one at least.
So the dormitory people tucked a little roller cot into the room she
was allotted, best they could do, and after she’d whispered a story into
his ear about trains and planes and cars, he slept. Exhausted as she
was, she couldn’t: not even his soft automatic breathing could seduce
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 243
her into sleep. The small room was meant for four, two bunk beds,
their ticking-covered mattresses rolled up, only her bed made. Like the
first girl in a summer-camp cabin. The sheets were rough and clean.
For a moment she wanted not to wonder at any of it, or think of it, just
lie and look and feel. She was nowhere she’d ever thought to be.
Those two men who’d given her a ride out here hadn’t been able to
think of a way to find Bunce: the plant and its processes went on around
the clock, but offices where inessential paperwork was done closed
sometimes, and the union office was closed too when they tried to call
there from the desk of the dormitory.
That crippled fellow: looking around the dormitory lounge where
the women sat or played cards or table tennis or just came and went.
The expression on his face. Never been inside here, he’d said. Connie
wanted to tell him to withdraw a bit; he looked like a kid in a toy store,
watching the electric train go around. Maybe that’s why she tugged his
coat, made him turn to face her, thanked him and kissed his cheek
with gratitude. She thought about him, his handicap, what that would
be like. She thought of the first day she’d gone to work at the Bull
plant. It had taken all her strength to act on what she’d known she had
to do—to get here with Adolph—and she didn’t know what she’d do
now, or what would come of it. She slept.
That night a hundred miles and more to the north of Ponca City, Muriel
Gunderson headed out on the dirt road from town to Little Tom Field
and the weather station there. Muriel was on rotation with three other
FAA weather observers, and while two shared the day and evening
shifts, Muriel would be all by herself on the 0000 to 0008 shift. The
drive out to the station was twenty miles—she got extra stamps—and
while she didn’t mind the night she got lonely and fretful sometimes, so
she brought her old dog Tootie along with her for the company.
She let herself into the weather station, a small gray building and a
shed between the two hangars that Little Tom Field offered. A couple
of Jennys and an old retired Kaydet were tied up by their noses out on
the field. She lit the lights and checked the instrument array, the ther-
mometer, the wet bulb, and then the anemometer, which was at the top
of a pole on the roof. She had to climb up the outside stair and then up
244 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
a staggered row of iron footholds, detach the machine, take it down
into the station, and record the wind speed—not much at all this still
night—and then climb back up the pole to replace it while Tootie
barked at her from below. She wa
s always nervous about climbing the
pole, not because she was afraid of heights—she wasn’t, and was glad
she’d wiped the grin off the face of the chief observer when he first told
her she’d have to climb it. No, she was afraid that if a rusted step broke
off or was wet or icy and she fell, there’d be no one who’d know about
it for hours, except Tootie, and he was no Rex the Wonder Dog who’d
go for help. Tootie’d bark and bark and then quit while she just lay
there and died.
She made coffee on the hot plate and plotted her observations on
the weather map, the part of the job she liked the best. At 0002 she
went out to the shed to launch the balloon. It was cold now and she
pulled on gloves—the helium tanks could be icy to the touch and the
connections could take a long time to get right, especially for a single
observer on a night shift. The empty balloon was slick and sticky like
peeled skin when you took it from the box and you had to get it
unfolded right and connected to the tank, and then you had to inflate
it enough to get it aloft but not so much that it would burst from the
decreasing pressure before it reached the cloud ceiling, which was high
tonight. Muriel had set up the theodolite on its tripod to track it as it
rose. When the limp balloon had started filling and swelling and lifting
itself—there were always jokes about what it reminded you of, you
couldn’t make them around the unmarried girls—Muriel prepared the
little candle in a paper lantern that it would carry upward. During the
day you could just track the balloon itself against the sky until it disap-
peared, but at night you needed that light. Muriel thought: better to
light one candle than to curse the darkness. She thought that once on
every night shift: better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
She got tired of herself, sometimes, alone.
This night she got the balloon off all right, it rose lightly and confi-
dently, there was no wind to snatch it out of her hand (take her hand
too and maybe herself upward with it) and the candle stayed lit, and
Muriel followed it with the scope of the theodolite, racking it upward
steadily, losing the little dot of light and finding it again. Until at last it
came to the cloud layer and dimmed and was gone. It always seemed
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 245
brave to her, that little flickerer, like the light of an old Columbus sail-