Four Freedoms

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.”

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  “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

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  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.

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  “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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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,