Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  It might be that his heart was cold from the beginning, because he was

  a cripple. Weak and twisted as his body was, he seemed unbreakable

  within, elastic, immune to whatever it was that pierced you and then

  was never after withdrawn. If it was so he was lucky, maybe, because

  how could he live otherwise? How could he risk it, falling for some-

  body, with that? Even the words “fall for” still induced in Vi a kind of

  panic, a vertigo that she’d once been sure she’d eventually pass beyond,

  and hadn’t.

  She wondered if she’d really been right about him and that married

  woman. She thought most likely yes, the way he’d responded when

  she’d brought it up. A married woman. With a kid, and a husband

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  right there at the plant where you worked too. That just took the cake,

  in Vi’s mind. Not that she herself hadn’t ever. But surely it was differ-

  ent if you could do it with a cold heart: if you could, it would actually

  make you kinder, more careful, less likely to do stupid bad things, hang

  on, wreck everything the way maddened lovers in the movies did. She

  hadn’t done any of that with her married man, hadn’t thought to do it,

  she’d stayed cool.

  A cool heart. Not cold; not hardened with cold. She didn’t know if

  Prosper had a cool heart. She’d write, and maybe learn how it turned out.

  7

  Oh my heavens look at you,” Connie said. “Oh I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Prosper said. “My own damn fault. Just not

  watching my step. So to speak.”

  She came in, pushed the door shut behind her, not taking her

  eyes from the ravages that she’d inflicted on him—that’s what her face

  said. She put the dish in the kitchen and came to where he lay. He

  described his injuries, just as he had to Vi, and just as Vi had, she sat

  down on the bed’s edge the better to study him, sat in fact perilously

  close to his legs, the third included, which was only just then starting

  to take it easy.

  “I can help,” she said. “I’ve got time. All the time in the world. I can

  run errands, I can get you things. Aspirins. Vaseline for the scabs.”

  “No no.”

  “I want to. I should.”

  “Okay thanks.”

  “My mother was a nurse.”

  “Oh.”

  She jumped up then, the bed bouncing painfully under Prosper, to

  take a magazine from Adolph, who’d found out how easily and sweetly

  it tore.

  “Oh let him have it,” said Prosper.

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  She turned to face him, still stricken. “He’s joining up,” she said.

  “Who is? Joining up with what?”

  “They said that he’d have to reestablish his deferment with the draft

  board because his situation changed. They said they thought it might

  be all right if he produced the documents, but he just said oh the heck

  with it, he’s not going to, he’s going to volunteer. He leaves in a

  week.”

  She was weeping now, not desperately but steadily, the way women

  can, he’d always marveled at it, the tears one by one tumbling out,

  hovering on the lashes, as though all on their own, while the weeper

  kept on making sense, sniffling now and then.

  “He said his life was too damn complicated.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s what he said to me.”

  “Well, kind of in a way, I mean . . .”

  “It’s my fault,” she said. “I drove him away.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Prosper said. He pulled his hand-

  kerchief from under his pillow and proffered it. She came and sat again

  on the bed.

  “I should never have left my home,” she said. “I should never have

  come down here. I should have stayed up there.”

  “Well,” Prosper said. True Story was full of accounts from women

  who felt that they’d driven their man away, by withholding themselves,

  by not meeting his needs, by indulging in finery or jewels or frolicking.

  But you often wondered if they meant it, or really believed they deserved

  what they got for it.

  “I mean shouldn’t I have? Shouldn’t I have just stayed home?”

  “Keep the home fires burning,” Prosper said, with what he hoped

  was sincere gravity, but Connie made a face and looked away, as though

  she knew better.

  “Oh yes. So I’d stay home and light my little light in the window

  and he could just go wherever he pleased and do whatever he pleased.”

  Her eyes, dry now, roamed in a rather scary way, unseeing, or seeing

  things and people not present. “Sure. Oh sure.”

  “No, well.”

  “That woman,” Connie said.

  “Oh Francine’s okay,” Prosper said. “She means no harm, she’s . . .”

  278 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  The glare she gave him stopped that line of thinking.

  “So um,” he said. “The army? That’s what he’s joining?”

  She seemed to come to, grow conscious of what he’d said, its mean-

  ing for her. “Oh God,” she said. “I ought to go. I have to go.”

  “You’re not going back north now, are you?” She hadn’t arisen from

  his bed.

  “No. No.”

  “You’ll take a job here maybe?” he said.

  “I might,” Connie said, as though Prosper might dispute this with

  her. “Otherwise I’d have to live on this allotment they give you. With

  my son. ” She looked toward Adolph, who, smiling, showed her the

  destruction he’d wrought.

  “You’ll do what you have to do,” Prosper said.

  “I’ll do what I want,” Connie said. She put her hand with grave

  gentleness on his cheek, looking into him with thrilling intensity. “I’m

  going to come again,” she said. “I don’t care, I’m going to come every

  day and help and see what you need until you’re better and up and

  around again. It was my fault and his fault and I don’t care what he

  thinks.”

  She patted his arm, stood, and went to the kitchen, discreetly tug-

  ging down the legs of her shorts. She picked up the dish she had put

  down there and held it up to him, tears again maybe glittering a little

  in her eyes, and gave him a big smile. “Tuna casserole,” she said.

  Vi never did write—too many things, too much life happening then—

  but years afterward, in a different world, she was sitting in a dentist’s

  office and picked up a magazine called Remember When, and saw,

  amid the articles about bottle collectors and old crafts, a collection of

  memories about the Ponca City plant, with a photograph of all of the

  Associates going in on the day shift; most of the people who’d sent in

  anecdotes were unknown to her, but in one of the letters there was

  Prosper’s name, amazing thing, and Vi thought she could guess who’d

  written it. She put the magazine in her bag; read it again later at night

  and thought of responding herself, even got out the typewriter, but in

  the end she wrote nothing. What had happened there couldn’t be recov-

  ered, because too much was happening at the same time, and how

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/>   could you express it all without wiping away all that had made it what

  it was—as this Connie W. person had done in her letter?

  I have so many memories of the men and women who worked

  there at Van Damme Aero P.C. and when I look back it all

  comes so vividly into my mind, the good things and other things.

  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I don’t sup-

  pose that anyone who hadn’t been there could imagine what it

  was really like—a lot different than you might think! The person

  I remember best was a fellow whose name was Prosper, though

  for the life of me I can’t remember his last name. He was handi-

  capped and walked with two crutches, or two canes I think; as

  I remember he worked in the print shop with an awful man who

  wrote press releases and harassed everyone. Well he had a lot to

  overcome (this Prosper I mean) but he was always so cheerful

  and optimistic and gave everyone who knew him a boost. He

  was a good friend to me after my husband went into the Army

  and I went to work there as an inspector. My shop number was

  128. I guess I came to know him a little more intimately than

  anyone else there, and I still can’t account in my mind for what

  made him the way he was, and how for all the trouble he’d had

  in his life he could take the trouble to make another person just

  feel all right inside.

  8

  Back then, Connie had wondered at Prosper too, just as Vi had:

  wondered at something that seemed so impervious in him,

  unbroken, undiscourageable. Lying beside his bare body in the

  spare bed in her house on N Street, Connie thought it was almost

  spooky: he was like one of those cheerful ghosts in the movies, who

  seem to have nothing left to lose, and only goodwill toward the living

  among whom they fade in and out, making things right.

  He was no ghost though. She put her hand tentatively down where

  his had been, and also where he’d. A little sore there. She’d always been

  reluctant to touch it much, but he sure hadn’t been, so why should she

  be? It was hers.

  What made him so complacent about all that, sex, as though it was

  easy? He of all people. Surely he couldn’t have been with many women,

  not so many that it would make him so—what was the word she

  wanted, so certain or steady, and yet so different from an actual ordi-

  nary man. She thought of Bunce. How different it was with him. Were

  there other different ways for men to be, other than those two? She’d

  probably never know. With Bunce it was sometimes more like a test, or

  a problem to be solved, only that was wrong because it wasn’t some-

  thing you did with your head. There seemed to be rules she didn’t

  know, that Bunce thought she’d know; he’d grow tense and watchful

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  when she did things wrong, sometimes if she did anything at all. Now

  and then his intense attention would remind her of his look when he

  played or practiced football and the whole of him was bent on doing

  the thing right, the unsmiling intent face and the funny leather hat that

  made it almost ridiculous if you weren’t doing it but watching it: in the

  bed sometimes too—times when she felt like she was watching and not

  doing—it was, just a little, ridiculous, since he was naked except for

  his socks, and the big bobbing thing to be managed right.

  She laughed or sobbed a little, and Prosper turned a little to touch

  her, laughing a little too, so she went quiet.

  Bunce had told her that, for a man, every time you spent, you lost a

  little time off your life—she couldn’t remember if he’d said a day or a

  month—and so every one cost him something, left him just a little

  weaker. And that’s what it seemed like.

  But oh not always. Not when, helpless and forgetful of all that at

  last, he’d just. And in those times it couldn’t be said who carried who

  forward, whether he’d surrendered to her or she to him. Those times it

  seemed to go on forever even though it was only a few minutes, seemed

  to be forever in the way they said immortal souls live outside time.

  They became “one with”—Father Mulcahy said you could become one

  with Jesus our Savior, one with Mary our Mother. Connie didn’t know

  what that would be like but she did know, in those moments with

  Bunce, what one with meant. She was one with him then. Oh Bunce.

  Prosper stirred beside her, strange bones of his stranger body on

  her, and a dark grief unlike any she’d known arose like something she’d

  swallowed and couldn’t expel.

  “What is it?” Prosper asked her softly. “Huh?”

  She wouldn’t say. She wept, but he wouldn’t just let her, cheerful

  himself and smiling, wanting to know, to make her feel better, as

  though nothing could really be the matter, hey come on, until she rose

  up and turned to him, face wet.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  “What’s up, what’s up?” she cried at him. “I’m cheating on my hus-

  band! He’s gone to be a soldier and he’s gone for one day and I’m

  cheating on him! I’m cheating on him with a cripple!”

  She plunged her face into the pillow and sobbed, as much so that

  she wouldn’t think of what she’d just said as to mourn or keen. After a

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  bit though she stopped. She wiped her face with the pillow slip and

  turned her face to him, to see how terribly angry he was. He was hard

  to read in the predawn, but he wasn’t looking her way; his eyes cast

  down, diminished, maybe crushed.

  “So,” he said softly, and she waited. “So does that mean,” not rais-

  ing his eyes to her, “I mean, if you feel that way about it—well I can

  understand, but does that mean you don’t want me to come back?”

  Prosper hadn’t, honestly hadn’t, expected all of that to happen, uneasily

  glad as he was that it had, and sorry as he’d be if it had to stop. He’d

  only come to the house on N Street (identical to his own) to show that

  he was truly now up and about, on his own, good as new or at least as

  good as he had been before, due to her ministrations, and to bring her

  a bottle of wine, Italian Swiss Colony, that he’d asked Pancho to buy

  for him on his monthly trip to the wet state next door. He’d also wanted

  to show her his new aluminum crutches, though he knew better than

  to carry on about them, people found it off-putting and after all they

  weren’t (though they might seem so to him) a new sport-model car or a

  Buck Rogers rocket belt. Handy was the word he’d use.

  Across her face when she opened the door to find him on the door-

  step (one thing hard to get in Henryville was telephone service; you’d

  have quit and moved back home before they got around to you) was

  that changeful flicker of hopeful, but maybe painful, feeling that he

  was getting used to. Such a small slight person, so full of emotions.

  Anyway all she said was Hello, and asked him in.

  He’d asked her how had it gone the day before, at the train station.

  Well fine, except that that woman (she’d never ever say Franci
ne’s name

  out loud) had the crust to show up too, all dolled up and wearing a veil

  and carrying on like some mourner at Valentino’s grave—as though

  she had a right! And Bunce himself, carrying the little bag Connie’d

  packed for him, had walked away with her down the platform, leaving

  his wife and son standing there. Just standing there! And after she’d

  gone away and Bunce had returned to Connie, well it was hard to wait

  for the train with him and say good-bye as she should, with all her

  heart, but she’d done it, she had. Was the wine for her? Oh that’s so

  kind, she’d never had wine like this before.

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  He sat at her kitchen table while she gave her son a glass of milk,

  speaking softly to him and he to her. The boy’s big brown eye fell on

  Prosper now and again, maybe as Connie’s had on Francine—no,

  surely a little kid wouldn’t know enough to be jealous of a man in his

  house. Connie ran a bath and dunked Adolph in it, talking on and on

  to him and to Prosper, who listened in a strange state of elevation,

  peaceful amid a family he could imagine might be like one he could

  have, while knowing it was Bunce’s, who’d take it out on him if he ever

  learned of Prosper’s sitting here at Bunce’s table eating a piece of

  Bunce’s own farewell cake and sipping pink wine from a tumbler.

  Then after a quiet half hour spent alone with Adolph in the bed-

  room, while Prosper read a comic book he found there, Connie’d come

  out and shut the door softly behind her.

  Prosper had intended to leave then, but of course he hadn’t, and she

  hadn’t wanted him to, that seemed evident, and they talked—she talked

  and he listened—and she tried the wine and said she liked it. The short

  night came down, and brought a lick of breeze—she called it a lick,

  tugging at the throat of her thin dress for it to enter there. Funny how,

  when the air cools, the sweat starts on your brow and lip, or maybe it

  was the wine. Could you put an ice cube in it? They decided you could

  if you wanted.

  She made him tell her about himself, and he watched what he told her

  reflected in her features. He told funny stories and odd ones and she

  laughed and marveled, but through all these, in her eyes and in the part-

  ing of her lips and the tender double crease that came and went in the