Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  space between her pale brows, he saw an underlying something, a hurt

  for him, even when the stories were about what he was proudest of.

  Then the wine was gone and they told secrets.

  She asked him if she could ask him a question, and he said sure she

  could, and she asked if you were, well, with a man who you loved, in

  the bed, and if that person couldn’t, you know, complete what you

  were doing or even get started because he couldn’t—well did that mean

  he didn’t love you, did it mean he hated you, or did it not mean that?

  What did it mean? And Prosper said he didn’t know because it hadn’t

  happened to him, and she said it hadn’t happened to her either, she just

  wondered. And she wept a little. He came to touch her.

  Still he could say that he hadn’t meant to stay, hadn’t meant to be

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  still awake with her when the sky began to lighten again. Throughout

  she was as tentative, and yet as determined, as he was: they took turns.

  She never said, and he never said, No we can’t. They just could and

  they did.

  She was so slim and pale, breasts no bigger than apples, and yet

  between her legs golden fur thick as a beast’s. Fascinating, but not to

  be remarked on, he knew that much. It crept up toward her navel and

  down her thighs, and seeing it and feeling it he noticed (as he hadn’t

  before) the light down on her upper lip, the soft hair of her cheeks by

  her ears, and the drape of hairs over her forearms like a monkey’s.

  They’d been there all along and still he’d expected a body smooth as a

  statue; now he knew better. What she’d expected of him she didn’t say:

  he was always unexpected, he knew, and he made no remark on that,

  either, though she seemed surprised by the willingness of him and of

  his eager part, as though maybe she’d expected that to be attenuated or

  wasted too, like his legs. Wouldn’t have been the first time for that

  either.

  But he really hadn’t expected all that or counted on it, and the

  proof was he’d not brought any of his Lucky brand condoms, still a

  couple left. When he said something to Connie that he hoped might

  make that clear— we shouldn’t, we should be careful because, you

  know—she’d slipped out of the bed (near naked and aglow, as though

  she drew all the small light in the house into herself) and gone to the

  bathroom and then returned, a strange sweet odor about her, and just

  picked up where they’d left off.

  What was it? he asked, afterward, and she whispered into his ear in

  the deep dark: Zonitor. What’s that? You put it, you know, up there,

  and you don’t get pregnant. She’d used it for a year with Bunce and

  never told him. Never told him.

  A while after that they started again.

  Then they’d come to the time at dawn where she’d wept about it,

  how she was cheating on Bunce with a cripple, and before she could

  answer his question to her (but he guessed the answer anyway because

  of the way she gasped in laughter at it, at his nerve), Adolph could be

  heard crying, then bawling: and in furious haste, as though the cops

  were at the door, she leapt up and struggled into her dress.

  He got himself together and went home. That dawn walk back. He

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  thought that, when and if it ever came time to assemble in memory all

  the most blessed moments in his past, then these dawns when a woman

  who had just allowed him into her life, maybe her heart, put him out

  because she had to return to her child, her work, her self, reluctantly

  from a warm bed or sometimes not so reluctantly—they would all be

  among the ones he would choose, though he couldn’t say why.

  9

  Connie waited another day, exhausted and immobile, and then

  bathed and dressed and went to get a job at Van Damme.

  First thing was to bring Adolph to the nursery and get him

  signed up and settled in. The nursery was in the same building

  as the huge cafeteria, occupying the whole sunny southern side, the

  curving spaces she’d seen in the magazine enclosing an inner space

  open to the sky, a playground with flowers and a little garden where

  the kids could grow their own vegetables (as she walked, Connie was

  reading from the little handout they’d given her). The principle the

  whole nursery and its kindergarten and classrooms went on was Learn-

  ing by Doing. Prepare the child for successful adaptation to the school,

  the plant, the office, and the community. Good citizenship begins in

  cooperation, respect for others, and a sense of accomplishment.

  It seemed a little more chaotic than that when she opened the glass

  doors and a wave of child and teacher voices hit her, a storm of babble,

  tears, cries of excitement. They gave you an hour or so on the clock to

  stay with your child so he wouldn’t get a complex from being aban-

  doned, but you didn’t have to use it if you thought everything would go

  all right. Adolph clung to her as though to a rock-ribbed shore against

  the breakers.

  “Well hello there, little fella,” said the receptionist, bending over him,

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  grandmotherly and gray; she reminded Connie of the woman at the

  United States Employment Office who had started her on this journey.

  “What’s your name?”

  Adolph made no answer, though he let go of Connie and smiled.

  Mrs. Freundlich somehow hadn’t left him with a terror of strangers,

  thank goodness.

  “His name’s Adolph,” Connie said.

  The woman lifted her brows, regarding Connie over her Ben Frank-

  lin glasses.

  “Well his name’s Adolph really,” Connie said. “But we always call

  him Andy.”

  “Andy,” said the woman, whose own name was Blanche. It said so

  on her badge. She filled out some forms, asked if Connie would like to

  have the cost deducted from her pay when she got a position, and

  whether her son had any medical problems. No he didn’t, he was fine.

  “Well then, come on in, Andy, and we’ll make you a card with your

  name, and get you all settled in.” Blanche set off unafraid into the pan-

  demonium beyond, sure-footed and broad-beamed, and Connie and

  Adolph went after her, his new name awaiting him, everything await-

  ing him, everything.

  At Intake, they spurned Connie’s little test paper with a smile, and

  nobody asked her for a birth certificate, though she’d brought it, which

  made her wonder why they ever had up north. It was as though the

  grimy and outworn Bull plant and its offices were located in some

  former age, as though she’d been transported into a grown-up world

  from a messy playroom. Next day she dropped Adolph, Andy, at the

  nursery and watched him totter off, as ready for this as she was. She

  started on the line, turning bolts with a driver, but as soon as she could

  she began looking at the training courses that you could take, get a

  better pay rate, do more interesting work. There were classes in Draft-

  ing, Engine Setup, Metal Lathe Operation, Blueprints, Calibrations.


  There were so many of them offered at so many different hours for dif-

  ferent lengths of time that Rollo Stallworthy had made up his own

  computer to keep them straight, a piece of cardboard with wheels of

  cardboard pinned to it and little isinglass windows that lined up to

  show the date and the times and the rooms and who had signed up for

  which.

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  One of Henry Van Damme’s ideas that his brother and his partners

  had rejected was a plan for training all new employees not just in one

  operation but successively in several—riveting, welding, engines, gun-

  nery calibration, subassembly, anything—so that eventually in the

  course of a single shift a person could take a break from one job and

  do another for a couple of hours, and then another. It’d keep you alert,

  he argued, keep boredom from setting in (he feared boredom intensely

  himself), make for happier workers. Variety is the spice of life. The

  engineers and efficiency experts reacted with horror. The constant

  traffic of people from workstation to workstation would cost time, so

  would the training; most of the workers coming in were barely capable

  of learning one simple job, let alone five or six—this wasn’t like down

  on the farm, where you milk cows in the morning and hoe corn in the

  afternoon. Very well, Van Damme at last said: but you’d better be

  ready for high turnover, and plenty of new trainees, and that’s time

  and trouble too. If you haven’t ever done it before, industrial labor is

  an awful shock, one or two simple motions performed every couple of

  minutes for forty-eight hours a week, plus overtime—plenty can’t take

  it, and that didn’t surprise Henry Van Damme any. Without bringing it

  up again he continued to brood on the matter and work up plans for

  how it could be done. The papers are in his archives today.

  Connie signed up for Billing and Comptometry. When she was

  given a job, she was also sent to study Wiring Procedures. She’d be an

  inspector when she’d mastered those, a white band around her left arm

  with that word written on it, and the power—the duty—to make the

  workers whose work she inspected do it over if it wasn’t done right.

  The first time she did that, and the woman whose work had failed

  inspection looked up wan and lost and hurt, Connie had smiled at her

  in a buck-up way and then gone off to the john and cried. Never again,

  though. Among the inspectors in her shop she was the most detested,

  particularly by the men: but she’d learned something about men, at the

  Bull plant and then here. Men—not all men but a lot, maybe most—

  didn’t know everything that they acted as though they knew, and

  weren’t as good at things as they let you think, tools and machinery

  and the tasks that those things were used for.

  “They pat you on the head,” Connie said to Prosper while Adolph

  got his supper, “or they look like they would if they could. Like you’re

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  a child. You ask them a question, they get all annoyed, as though sure,

  they’ve got it all under control. Then you look at what they did and it’s

  not right. It’s just not right.”

  Prosper—glad not to be one of the they she described, nobody could

  say he’d ever lorded it over man or mouse—shook his head in sympa-

  thy. He was all in favor of her, himself. He admired her for the hard

  skilled work she did, and the courses she studied for in her spare time,

  and the way in which, despite all that, she cared for her son with what

  seemed single-minded intensity. What he wondered was if she also

  undertook those many things so as to be too busy to have to decide to

  go to bed with him. He hadn’t had a lot of welcome that way, quick as

  he was to pick up on any that he got. Sunday she’d take the church bus

  to St. Mary’s in Ponca City, in her nicest dress and a hat; Sunday was

  his only day off, and hers. When Adolph’s, no Andy’s, supper was done

  she planned (she told him) to take a long bath and wash her hair and go

  to bed, and he understood her, the way she said it, very clearly. Not

  that she didn’t want him there: she seemed to need him, greeted him

  with ardent hugs as soon as he’d got inside and away from neighbors’

  eyes. He’d stay till he wasn’t wanted, then head home alone; come back

  another day, to knock on the subletter’s door after night had fallen.

  “I just can’t help thinking all the time how jealous Bunce would be

  if he found out,” she said to him when once he pressed her. “He’d go

  crazy. Thinking of that makes me feel, well, not so much like loving.”

  She sat at the kitchen table, where she was filling in a Suggestions

  form. Ever since she became an inspector she seemed to notice a lot of

  things that could be done better. Her Suggestions were growing longer.

  Sometimes they needed two pages.

  “He is jealous,” Prosper said thoughtfully. “I don’t know how he can

  be so jealous when he . . . The things he’s done. It’s not exactly fair.”

  “All men are jealous,” Connie said. “They just are.”

  “Well,” Prosper said. “I’m not.”

  “No?” She looked up from the paper and twiddled her pencil. “Not

  jealous?”

  “I’m not,” he said. “But I can be envious.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Well,” he said. The distinction was one he’d read about in an article

  called “Obstacles to Your Complete Happiness” in The Sunny Side long

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  ago. “The jealous person wants what he has all to himself. The envious

  person wants what he wants, but he doesn’t mind if other people have it

  too.”

  “So you can share,” Connie said smiling. “Adolph’s learning to

  share, in the nursery.”

  “Good.”

  “That doesn’t sound like envy.”

  “It is if you don’t get what you want that someone else has,” Pros-

  per said. “Or if another person gets more. It can drive you nuts.”

  Connie looked down at the form she’d been working on. “He is my

  husband,” she said.

  When she was done with her bath that night she let him just lie with

  her on the bed, the other bed from hers and Bunce’s, maybe just too

  weary to resist him, and he embraced her from behind and reached

  around to touch her. He pushed down her damp pajamas, his hand

  searching in the fastness of her thick hair. She lay against him as still as

  a doll or a corpse (he’d never lain with either of those), but he did as Vi

  had taught him, wondering if maybe it only worked with Vi no matter

  what Vi said, but she seemed to melt against him, small adjustments of

  her into him, until he felt her breath quicken as though unwillingly,

  and hot with hope, as well as with the sound and feel of her, he’d kept

  on until she tensed suddenly with an animal’s grrr, shook, and then

  softened; and slept. That was all. Every week a letter came for her from

  Bunce, somewhere in basic training: Prosper saw the envelopes. The

  number of glass Zonitor capsules in Connie’s box, stoppered wit
h

  white rubber, ceased going down.

  Early in June the Allied armies landed in France. Even people who never

  cared to follow the battles, who didn’t take out their atlases when the

  President suggested they should in order to understand his radio chats,

  now gathered at the radio and opened the papers, or listened to others

  who read from theirs aloud. Women with men in the services, sons and

  brothers and husbands; boys waiting for a call-up; older men remem-

  bering France in 1918. Connie in the hot night, hoarse from shouting

  all day over the plant noise, sat on the step of Pancho and Prosper’s

  house and listened to Rollo read Ernie Pyle’s column about what the

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  beach in Normandy had looked like after those days, when the battle

  had gone on into the interior and it was silent there. Prosper lay asleep

  on his bed, and Adolph, who often as not was now Andy even to his

  mother, lay asleep next to him. Rollo read about the vast wastage Ernie

  Pyle had seen, the scores of trucks and tanks gone under the waters

  and lost, landing craft upended on the shore, the big derricks on tracks

  stuck in the sand or wounded and inoperable, the half-tracks hit by

  shells, spilling supplies and ammunition and office equipment, type-

  writers and telephones and filing cabinets all smashed and useless.

  Great spools of wire and rifles rusting and the corners of dozens of

  jeeps buried in the sand poking out. And Ernie said it didn’t matter,

  that unlike the young men buried too in the sand or being collected for

  burial, that stuff didn’t count, there was so much more where that

  came from, replacements a hundred and a thousand times over, you

  couldn’t imagine how much more, a steady stream pouring ashore from

  that great flotilla of ships standing off to sea. Two young German pris-

  oners staring out at it all in dull amazement.

  Even in this yard at the far edge of Henryville the sound of B-30

  engines being tested, starting, winding down, starting.

  Connie asked Rollo: “Why can’t they do that without a war?”

  Rollo looked up from the paper, shook it, out of habit, but didn’t

  look back down at it; waited for Connie to explain what she meant.

  “I mean why can’t we just do this all the time, the way we’re doing,

  that we’ve got so good at. Not to provide for war but just to provide for