by John Crowley
everyone. The way everyone’s provided for here. Not just the pay, but
everything.”
“Well for one thing,” Rollo said, “because the government had to
borrow the money for all that. The country’s going into debt making
this vast amount of stuff that when the war is over no one will want
anymore—guns and bombs and bullets and tanks. And they’ll still
have to pay back what they borrowed.”
“But why can’t we just turn around and order the same system, the
one big system, to make things that people do want. Like those refrig-
erators we all have here, or new cars, or better houses, or anything.
Then people would be making a lot of money making the things and
also be able to spend it, because the things they’d be making would be
things people want.”
292 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“But who’d decide what people want?” Rollo had come to like
Connie, and respect her too, and when his health wouldn’t permit him
to work, which wouldn’t be long from now, he intended to put in her
name to replace him as foreman, or forelady he guessed she’d be called.
It wasn’t unheard of. “Now it’s the government and the army that
decide, and sometimes they’re wrong. What if they’ve built the B-30
for nothing, what if it’s not the airplane that’s needed? Well, who’d
care, if the war got won? Waste wouldn’t matter, like the paper here
says. But after the war that wouldn’t work—lots of things made that
nobody wants to pay for, and the government not there to borrow
money to buy it. It’d just go unsold. Businesses would go under. Jobs
lost. Depression.”
He put aside the paper and picked up his Roy Smeck model banjo.
Connie didn’t know how he could be so sure about this. Maybe there
was a way to know. A science of knowing what people want. Their
Passions, like old Mr. Notzing talked about. Not all people all the
time, but enough. And not just the necessary things but silly things
they’d want to buy that are fun and amusing for a while. Fashions. Sex
appeal. But would there be any way to know enough about all people,
each individual, so the system could work? You couldn’t just order
them all to go to Bethlehem to be taxed. They’d somehow have to do it
themselves, associate themselves countrywide and maybe worldwide
with their Passional Series of like-minded or like-feeling people, and be
able to know hour by hour what all of them were doing and wanting
and getting or not getting. Not even a worldwide telephone tree would
be able to do that. Nothing could.
She looked at the radium dial of the new wristwatch on her wrist,
which she’d bought out of her last paycheck, which had gone right into
the Van Damme bank, she’d never seen it at all.
“Time to go,” she said.
Connie’s wristwatch and the big black-and-white clocks high up on the
walls of the Assembly Building agreed that it was lunchtime, and bleat-
ing horns announced it for those deep in the guts of a Pax where they
couldn’t see. Connie’d been going over the wiring with a girl whose
badge said her name was Diane, who watched Connie and listened to
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 293
her in a kind of beautiful lazy way. She didn’t fidget or get annoyed
when Connie kept her there after the horn sounded, let’s just get this
done, though her dark eyes withdrew a little.
Just finishing up when she saw Prosper coming toward her, as he
did now every day almost at this hour. Her friend Prosper.
“Okay,” she said to Diane, the noise in this shop ceasing.
Then Diane saw the inspector’s face alter, and something flew into
it because of something that she saw. Diane turned to see what it was.
The inspector was already climbing down from the platform, danger-
ously fast. At first Diane thought it was the crippled man coming this
way with a smile on his face, but then that man looked behind him, as
though he too understood Connie had seen something big. And Diane
watched her rush past that fellow to a man in uniform now coming
down the floor fast, snatching the cap from his dark curls and opening
his arms to her.
“So. He’s back, I guess.”
The crippled man had come to Diane’s station, and seemed to be
hiding behind the scaffolding of the platform.
“Who’s back?”
“That inspector’s husband. I mean I guess he’s her husband.”
“Her name’s Connie,” Diane said, thinking the guy surely knew
that. “Looks like she’s not gonna come back and finish this.” Connie
and her serviceman were wrapped in each other, oblivious, drinking
each other in. Workers went by them, some smiling. Diane climbed
down.
“Were you,” the man with the crutches asked her, “headed for
lunch?”
“Well. Yes.”
“Walk with me,” he said, a little urgently.
He steered them not toward the cafeteria but toward a lunch wagon,
one of many that served far parts of the plant, that was drawing up not
far down the floor. It was a little trying, she found, walking with him;
not only did she have to walk with an unnatural slowness to keep from
getting ahead of him, but she also felt her body tense, as though she
needed to lend him encouragement, the way you bend and make a face
to force a pool ball to go right.
“So she was glad to see him, I guess,” he said, looking straight ahead.
294 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Well heck yes. Sure. Who wouldn’t be. You could just see it in her
eyes.”
He said nothing.
“That uniform too,” Diane said, guiltily pleased to be able to tease
him a little. “They come home in that uniform, it does something to a
girl. I can tell you.”
“Well.” He seemed to pick up the pace a little, flinging his puppet’s
feet forward. “He was gone a while, I guess. I mean not long as these
things go these days.”
“No.”
“I mean not actually gone at all, really, not yet. It’s not like he’s
back from fighting the Nazis for years.”
Diane laughed at that extravagance and at the grim face he’d pulled.
“So actually you’re a friend of hers.”
“I’d say so.”
“A special friend.”
“Well she’s got it tough,” he said. “With a kid and all and her man
gone.”
“A kid? Jeez.” Diane said nothing more for a time. “My guy’s in the
service,” she said then. “My husband.”
He looked her way, to read the face she’d said that with: it was a
sentence you heard a lot, said in different ways, with different faces.
“Army?”
“Navy. He’s a fighter pilot.” She was always shy to say it, as though
it might sound like bragging; plenty of women didn’t mind bragging,
good reason or not, she’d heard them.
“So,” he said. He’d stopped to rest, she could understand why. “My
name’s Prosper.”
“Diane.” She put out her hand, man-style, to shake.
They reached the lunch wagon, a Humphrey Pennyworth contrap-
tion with a motorbike front end and a driver in white with a billed cap
like a milkman. They got in the line. The word up ahead was that It’s-
It bars—which Henry Van Damme had ordered to be shipped out every
month from the Coast in refrigerated trucks—were now available, and
the line got a little impacted with eagerness.
“It is hard,” Prosper said, to her and not to her. “It is hard.”
She’d rushed right past him unseeing, Connie had: seeing only the
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 295
thing she aimed for. Bang into Bunce, as though he were her other half,
found again at last. He had glanced back at them and he knew. For
Bunce alone the lamps of her eyes were lit.
For that guy. For him.
Could it be that women really liked it that a man was jealous of
them? Did they like jealous men better than those like himself who
weren’t? The furies that such men were capable of in True Story, the
jealousy, it was always terrible and unwarranted and a man always had
to surrender it before the woman would once again be his. But maybe
that wasn’t true of them, only they didn’t like to admit it: maybe they
could love a man who was mean to them and cheated on them, as long
as he was deeply jealous, as long as he wanted them for himself alone.
He didn’t know and didn’t want to think so. But he felt pretty sure
that for one reason or another no woman was ever going to look at him
the way Connie had looked at Bunce as he approached, all her heart in
her face; or take hold of him as she had Bunce, her man.
“They’ve got ham sandwiches and cheese sandwiches,” Diane said,
startling him.
“Ah. Um. One of each,” he said, and she fetched them. “Thank you.”
For some reason Diane kept running into this guy Prosper on the floor
in the following days, or saw him passing by in the little Aero car with
the reporter fellow, or in the cafeteria. Of course he was pretty visible,
once you’d noticed him. They had a brief conversation now and then
that never seemed quite to come to an end, one more thing to say that
he didn’t say.
Then she found a note in her little mail cubby at the dormitory. It
was addressed just Diane, with a beautiful question mark after it of a
kind she didn’t think ordinary writers made. She unfolded it and it was
all written in the same kind of beautiful script that only appeared in
magazines.
Hello Diane, I got your name off your name tag the other day
and I’m guessing this is you. It seemed to me if you don’t mind
my saying so that you were looking a little down lately, and I
just wanted to remind you that over in the Bomb Bay tonight
296 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
there’s a real band playing, not just records, and I thought you
might like to go listen, and dance—not that I’m claiming any
ability to dance! Anyway I thought it might be fun, and it starts
at 8 P.M. Your friend, Prosper Olander.
Sweet, she thought. She fanned herself with it; the day had already
grown hot, too hot for the time of year. It was going to be awful in that
plant.
Why shouldn’t she go, anyway. What harm was there in it? She
could maybe cheer him up too, a nice fellow, that funny crush he’d had
on a married woman, married to a GI. She’d go: it wasn’t like you were
exactly stepping out with an actual fellow anyway.
A real band. She remembered the noise of the big band in the Lucky
Duck, the mob on the dance floor, the sweet smell of the 7-and-7s on
the table: it hadn’t been much more than a year ago, but it seemed
more than long ago, it was as though those weren’t memories of her
grown-up life but scenes from her childhood, or from the life of a kid
sister she’d never had, a crazy kid sister she’d left back there and would
never see again.
PART FOUR
1
Past midnight, and the Lucky Duck on Fourth Avenue was full to
overflowing, as a continuous wash of people entering through
two sets of double doors arose into the bars and restaurants and
seemed to displace another bunch that spilled back out into the
street and streamed away toward the lesser venues or toward the street-
cars and the late shifts, the naval bases and the ships.
Harold Weintraub’s Lucky Duck—that was the full name of the
place, the name the maître d’s spoke with unctuous exactness on answer-
ing the phones, the name printed on all the huge menus and the little
drinks cards, that was written in neon and lightbulbs across the facade,
the double name casting a backward glow and lighting the rooftop
garden along with the Chinese lanterns and palm-shaped torchères—
was stomping. It was the night that the band playing in the big
second-floor ballroom changed, and the new band (their pictures
inserted in the holders by the doors, the featured players tilting into the
picture frame as though coming out to get you with their gleaming
instruments and hair) was one everybody wanted to hear. The doormen
were overcome by the people moving in on them, many of them men in
uniform who of course got to go in, but what about the girls they claimed
were sisters and cousins too, leaning on their arms, and the couples in
evening clothes and opera capes who would certainly be buying a steak
300 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
dinner and a bottle of champagne, and—the hell, why not everybody,
even the unescorted dames you were supposed to be selective about.
Before the war the Lucky Duck had been a big and rather gloomy
Chinese restaurant, and still now there were bead curtains in the doors
to the cocktail bars and those big obscure plaques that were Chinese
good-luck signs (someone always claimed to know this); there was still
chow mein and chop suey and egg foo yung on the menus and little
cruets of inky soya sauce on the tables. People ate a lot there, but the
food wasn’t the draw; when Harold Weintraub, whom nobody had
ever heard of, decided to turn himself into Dave Chasen or Sherman
Billingsley, he bought the huge place and added an upper storey and
took over the five-and-dime next door too—nobody needed pots and
pans and clothespins and washboards for now, not around here anyway,
but they did need more room to have fun. “I want our uniformed ser-
vicemen to have a place where they can have fun,” Harold (a strangely
joyless and beaky fellow in drooping evening clothes) said to the papers
on opening night 1942. The new lights spelling out his name were
sadly unlit because of the blackout then in force. Harold was more suc-
cessful than he could have imagined, probably, and as the population
of the city almost doubled with war workers and servicemen the fun
got so intense that he spent his own time just trying to keep a lid on the
roiling pot so the authorities—the military police, city hall, the vice
squads, and the DAR—didn’t shut him down in favor of something
more wholesome, and quieter.
That amazing rolling thunder a big band could make when it started
a song with the thuddi
ng of the bass drum all alone, like a fast train
suddenly coming around a bend and into your ear: a kind of awed
moan would take over the crowd when they did that, and then all the
growling brass would stand and come in, like the same train picking
up speed and rushing closer, and the couples would pour onto the floor,
the drumming of their feet audible in the more bon ton nightclub
downstairs, where the crooner raised his eyes to the trembling chande-
lier in delight or dismay. Diane and the four girls she had quickly allied
with at the door (easier to pour in past the hulking guy in epaulettes in
a crowd) were swept out of their seats by a raiding party, three sailors,
a Navy pilot with that nice tan blouse and tie they wore, and a sad sack
soldier seeming no older than themselves. The girls couldn’t turn them
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 301
down, not with that surging rhythm sucking them all in, but they
tried—it was part of the game to say No a couple of times, they all
played it that way, even Diane knew that.
“Diane,” she’d said to the other girls as they shook hands over the
unbused table they’d claimed, giggling in glee about the dope at the
door and their rush upstairs. She recognized a couple of them, she
thought, probably from somewhere else on Fourth Avenue or Fifth
where they all came together and floated, waiting to see where they
could sneak in or who might come out and notice them. This was the
first time she’d tried the Duck (that’s what the other girls called it), and
she was filled now with a kind of buzzing brimming triumph that she
tried to hide under an above-it-all kind of smiling inattention.
Her Navy guy wasn’t much of a dancer. He pushed her around in a
halfhearted Lindy but mostly talked.
“You been here a lot?”
“Some.”
“My first time. You know they can fit five thousand people in this
place? What I hear.”
“And they all want to use the washrooms at once,” Diane said. It
was a crack somebody else had made and she was proud she remem-
bered it.
“What’s your name?”
“Diane.” She perceived he was talking in order to bend his cheek
nearer hers, to make himself heard over the band.
“Danny,” he said. “We both got a D and an N.”
“And an A, ” Diane said. Her name wasn’t Diane, it was Geraldine,
