Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  Or when their man comes home from overseas. You’ll see them down

  tools right in the middle of the shift. ‘My man’s home, I’m done.’ ”

  “Oh Bunce.”

  “You know when my dad was first hurt, Mom went to work, in that

  hotel kitchen. It almost killed Dad; it was worse than his back. Him

  sitting home and his wife working. My mom.”

  Just as he said that, Connie’s eyes fell on a comic poking out from

  under the others on the box-table. The part of the cover she could see

  showed a woman, caped and booted in red, her arms extended the way

  flying heroes always held them and she never did when she flew in

  dreams. The woman was shooting straight down through the clouds,

  toward earth presumably, and toward the bottom of the book, where

  huge red letters spelled MOM.

  “I gotta get to work,” he said, lifting her.

  She let him go and dress, watched him and talked with Adolph: See

  Daddy put on socks, put on boots and lace them up, put on his shirt

  and button it up to his neck, and his jacket. She wandered the little

  place, went into the bathroom, where Bunce’s razor and brush and cup

  of soap stood on the back of the sink. He used a straight razor, liking

  the skill it took, proud of his skill with it. A comb there too, clogged

  with hair. Blond hair.

  “Do you live here all alone?” she called to Bunce, and when he

  couldn’t hear she came out with the comb in her hand and asked again.

  “Of course not,” he said. “Couldn’t afford it. I have a fellow lives

  here, that’s his room over there. Except he just got fired for some black

  market stuff, stealing from the company, and he’s gone. Good riddance

  to bad rubbish.”

  He was done dressing, he was Bunce again, broad belt buckled and

  the long end tucked in, crushed cap on—he put it on Adolf, then back

  on himself as Adolph reached for the buttons on it.

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  “What’ll I do?” Connie said. “Adolph’s going to get hungry.”

  “There’s milk in the icebox,” Bunce said. “And here.” From the

  table he picked up his brown pay envelope, two-fingered out the bills,

  a thick wad it seemed to her, and took a five to give her. “There’s a bus

  that stops at the corner, that way. It goes out to the market. They’ll tell

  you where. Go buy some food.”

  “Okay.”

  He took her in his arms. “So no more about working,” he said.

  “You make a home for us.”

  “All right I’ll try,” she said—what else, in his arms, could she do?—

  and it wasn’t as though she lied, or didn’t mean it; it was as in Confes-

  sion, when you had a Firm Purpose of Amendment in regard to

  something sinful (Bunce, the back seat of the Plymouth) and meant it

  with all your might even as you heard yourself dissent deep inside, a

  you that you knew you’d listen to, the you on whose side you always

  really were. The priest called that a Mental Reservation.

  “Good,” he said. “I love you, Connie.”

  “Oh God I love you too Bunce, so much.” So rarely could he say it

  to her with that kind of plain sincerity that it swept her hotly to hear it,

  and she assented within herself, she’d do what he asked, all that he

  asked, with only the Mental Reservation because there was no help for

  that.

  When he’d shut the door she looked around herself. She could

  clean up.

  “Daddy,” said Adolph, as you might say A storm.

  “Daddy,” Connie said, nodding. “Tell him that. Daddy.”

  She pushed the papers on the table into a pile, and the comic book

  with the red-clad heroine on it came out, and she saw she’d got it

  wrong. The girl—Mary Marvel, a windblown skirt and cascade of

  chestnut curls—was flying not down but up, through the clouds to blue

  sky beyond, and the real title of the book, now right side up, was

  WOW.

  4

  Toward the end of his shift, as he was making his way up the

  Assembly Building, Prosper caught sight of the woman from the

  train station, Connie, and her boy, walking slowly and both

  looking upward, as once he had done on first entering here. The

  boy was pointing up into the fantastic tangle of beams and struts fill-

  ing the spaces overhead.

  He reached where they stood and looked up with them. A crane car

  was now drifting with great slowness toward them, carrying an entire

  assembled wing section slung below and hanging in midair.

  “Uh-oh,” he said. “They’ve got it backward.”

  “Oh. Oh hi.”

  Connie looked where he looked: it made her heart sink toward her

  stomach to watch the wings proceed down the line. They weren’t fin-

  ished, they needed their final pieces on each end, she could see that, but

  they had their huge engines all installed, three on each side, and yes,

  she saw that they were on the wrong edge, they were on the behind

  edge not the leading edge where all airplanes have their engines.

  “Oh gee,” Prosper said. “This one’ll never fly.”

  Was he joking? He had to be. Above the moving wing assembly she

  could see the crane operator, a woman. Maybe she’d made some dread-

  ful . . . But no, of course not, all the dozens of men on the floor were look-

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  ing up too, whole teams ready to mount the rolling staircases and assist

  the mating, which wasn’t different in a way from affixing the wings cross-

  wise on a little balsa-wood model, the notches precut to receive the tabs.

  They’d surely see if anything wasn’t right. She felt Prosper’s hand on her

  elbow—looking upward she hadn’t seen him come so close as to touch

  her—and he was smiling. “Nah. They told me the same thing when I

  started,” he said. “They’re called pusher engines. They work fine. They

  push instead of pulling. They told us how, but I couldn’t repeat it.”

  Now the two parts were coming together, so slowly as to seem

  unmoving. A team of men (and one tall woman) guided it down—they

  seemed able to move it with a touch, vast as it was. The little people—

  they seemed little now compared to it, its huge tires and struts and

  expanses of silvery metal—swarmed up the ladders and made ready to

  do whatever they had to do to link them.

  Connie walked on. She’d begun to see, in that moment, as though

  through the confusing reflection of thousands of overhead bars of light

  on shiny identical parts, how it was meant to work, how it did work.

  Behind the plane another middle part stood, and another crane now

  turned the corner bringing in another pair of wings to be rested on it.

  Who thought of this? she wondered. How long did it take to think

  of? Did people just know that’s the way big airplanes had to be built, or

  was it a new plan just for these? Did they argue about it, work it all out,

  come to an agreement? If it didn’t work, and it was you who’d thought

  of it and convinced the others, what happened to you? Did you lose

  your job and have to go away in shame? Or did they spread the blame

  around, and just set to work to do better? Nobody’d
ever explained any

  of this to her. Maybe everybody knew about it, maybe it was so univer-

  sally known that nobody thought they needed to explain it to her. She

  bet not, though. She bet almost nobody knew it, not all these women

  and men working away, the shop stewards and the engineers unrolling

  their blueprints, toolshops dispensing tools, she bet none of them knew

  any more than she did. She wondered if they’d even wondered. If she

  had, they must have, mustn’t they? Some of them at least. A few.

  She became aware of Adolph tugging at her slacks. Somehow the

  place didn’t alarm or terrify him, maybe it was just too huge to be per-

  ceived, out of his ken.

  “Yes, hon.”

  256 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  He tugged again, she was to get it. “Tired and hungry,” she said to

  Prosper. “We came to see where his daddy works.” She showed him the

  visitor pass she’d been given.

  “Well say,” he said. “Maybe he’d like an ice cream. There’s a milk

  bar just down in the far corner there, off the floor.”

  “Really. Well, that’s nice. We’ll do that.”

  “I’m just off,” Prosper said. “I could use a soda too. Mind if I . . .”

  “No no,” Connie said. She looked down at Adolph. “Okeydokey?”

  she said.

  The milk bar was a long space with the wide plate-glass windows that

  were everywhere here, as though no one should be hidden from anyone

  else, the common job proceeding in your sight even if you weren’t doing

  it, and if you were, showing you what you could do next, relax and enjoy.

  It was sort of self-service, you stood in line and ordered from a long

  menu, then moved away to be given what you’d ordered. The whole place

  was painted in pink, pale brown, and yellow, like Neapolitan ice cream.

  “Oh gee I forgot, I didn’t bring any money,” Connie said. “Oh I’m

  so sorry.” They were already far up the line, and Adolph, who knew

  where he was now, was reaching symbolically toward the treats being

  handed out. What had she thought, that this was a date?

  “I think I’ve got some,” Prosper said. “A little.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “No no.”

  “Sure.” Balancing on each crutch in turn, he rooted in his right then

  his left pocket. He held out the coins he’d found to her in his palm, and

  she counted them with a forefinger. Not much.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I mean I don’t really need.”

  “No come on,” he said. “An ice cream for, for Adolph, and why

  don’t we split an ice-cream soda? Would that be all right?”

  “Well.” He was so, what, so willing, no standing on pride, it made

  her smile. “All right.”

  “Double chocolate?”

  “All right.”

  She got Adolph’s ice cream; she was making for a booth when she

  looked back—Prosper still stood at the counter and the soda was before

  him and Connie realized he’d have a hard time carrying it away, maybe

  couldn’t at all, had he always had someone to help? He must need it.

  Like Adolph. But never really growing all the way up.

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  She got the soda and they sat; Adolph dug into the ice cream and

  Connie and Prosper de-papered their straws and plunged them into the

  dark foaming soda together; took a suck; raised their eyes to meet.

  Like a kid’s first date, she thought, like one in the movies anyway.

  It was that scene, displayed by the picture windows, that Vi Harbi-

  son saw, just knocking off then too. Stopped even to observe for a bit,

  occluded by the crowd passing outward around her: how absorbed

  they were, spooning, sucking, speaking, smiling. Ain’t that grand, she

  thought, and she really thought it was; almost laughed a hot dangerous

  laugh at the pleasure it gave her, well well well.

  They weren’t quite done, still sucking noisily at the bottom of the

  glass in its silvery holder, when Bunce came by. In the great seamless

  transition from shift to shift nearly everyone going out passed these

  windows, this place, which is why it was where it was.

  He banged in through the glass doors and was beside Connie’s

  booth before she knew he’d come in.

  “What are you doing, Connie?”

  He shot one look at Prosper and no more, inviting no remark.

  “Bunce.”

  “Are you trying to make a monkey out of me?” He lifted Adolph

  from his seat, who began to complain, not done yet. “Come on.”

  Connie glanced once at Prosper, who’d neither moved nor spoken,

  whose face was attempting to express nothing but a pleasant detach-

  ment, and rose to follow Bunce out.

  “So what the hell’s all that?” Bunce said, still a step ahead of her.

  “I came to visit. To see if I could find you, see where you worked.”

  She showed him her pass.

  “And you found that guy instead.” He flicked one look her way,

  then fiercely on ahead again. “You don’t know what it’s like around

  here,” he said. “The men around here.”

  She caught up with him, took his arm.

  “Bunce,” she said with soft urgency. “Just look at him.”

  Prosper was gathering himself now to leave the table, and Bunce

  stopped, looked back to see him manipulate his crutches, swing his

  inert legs away from the table, steady himself, and attempt to rise; fail;

  try again, and succeed. Then set off.

  “Yeah well,” Bunce said.

  258 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  “I was being nice.”

  “Yeah.” He looked down at her. “Yeah well. Be careful too.”

  She took his arm. Adolph was still held in his other arm. She wanted

  to look back too, and see how Prosper had managed in the milk bar, if

  he’d got out all right, but that only made her cling tighter to her hus-

  band. “So you’ll be home for dinner,” she said. “I’ll make a Swiss

  steak.”

  “I can’t come home. I’ll be back late.”

  “Why? Where are you going? Do you have overtime?”

  “No.”

  “Then what—”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well what—”

  “Connie, you don’t ask me!” He shifted Adolph violently in his

  grip. “Connie you just come down here, you bust right into my life here

  without asking, and you . . . Just listen when I tell you. I’ll be back

  later.”

  She said nothing more, marched along beside him, didn’t shrug away

  his arm when again he took hers. She’d come so far. She’d come to fight

  for him, and she knew what that meant, it meant actually not fighting.

  She knew what happened to the desperate weepers and beggars, the

  cold schemers and the furious hair-pullers, they never won and she

  wasn’t going to be one of them. You just kept your head high. You

  waited and you saw it through and stayed ready and kept your head

  high. The only way you could lose was if you stopped wanting to win.

  In that month a directive came down from the front office, ultimately

  from the War Department, that all men with deferments had to report

  to their local draft boards to be reassessed. Rollo Stallworthy told the

  men on his
team that this did not, repeat not, mean that anyone was

  necessarily going to lose his deferment. Just Our Government at Work,

  he said: they want to make sure they’re using every available person to

  maximum gain. Most of the men at Van Damme had registered at draft

  boards far away, so arrangements were made to bus the men to the

  capital, rather than burden the local Ponca City board and cause delays

  in getting back to work. Chits were handed out.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 259

  Prosper’s draft status was ambiguous. He’d gone down that first

  time to register, before the war began. Then somehow the notice to

  report for his physical never came, or had been missed. (Actually Bea

  had discarded it, supposing the army must know better and it had come

  in error.) Then he’d worked at The Light in the Woods, and all the

  workers there who weren’t already iv-F got a provisional deferment, till

  they quit or were otherwise let go; then he’d left town. So he signed up

  to be sent with the others, in order to be finally rejected. On a morning

  growing fearsomely hot, he mounted a bus with the skilled machinists,

  tool-and-die men, draftsmen, engineers, farm laborers, Indians, and

  fathers in war work (fatherhood alone wasn’t enough now), and took an

  empty seat. A school trip hilarity prevailed on the bus as it set out,

  except among a few men who found the exercise a waste of time (the

  unions were arguing with Van Damme Aero as to whether the men

  would be paid for this jaunt) or who actively feared losing their status:

  not every floor sweeper or lightbulb changer or pharmacist’s helper in

  the vast complex was “a man necessary to national defense” and might

  see his cozy iii-A rating evaporate. We didn’t all want to be heroes.

  The bus had turned out onto the highway, a hot breeze coming in

  the window, when someone changing his spot sat down next to Pros-

  per. Momentarily, Prosper tasted chocolate ice cream. It was Connie’s

  husband. Bunce.

  Prosper moved his crutches out of the way and gave Bunce a nod;

  Bunce thumbed the bill of his cap in minimal greeting. He neither

  spoke nor smiled, and turned away. Neither of them remarked on

  Bunce’s having shifted seats. Bunce pulled from his denim coat pocket

  a toothpick, and chewed delicately. Prosper felt sweat gather on his

  neck and sides.

  “So this is stupid,” Bunce said at last, but not as though to Prosper.