Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  the most American name her parents could come up with. She’d been

  staring at it one day, written on a school paper, and suddenly saw the

  other name contained within it, the letters even in the right order, most

  of them. It seemed like a gift, even a sign. She knew how to be Ameri-

  can better than they ever would. She told Danny that she’d graduated

  from high school the June before, but that wasn’t so either. She had a

  year to go, and more than that if things went on the way they were

  going, but she didn’t care, she just couldn’t see it, why it was important

  now; she knew how much it meant to her parents, who told her all the

  time that she represented her people and her community and had a

  responsibility. Her brother’d got a beating when their father caught him

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  trying to get out of the house in a pair of pegged pants and a broad

  fedora, watch chain swinging, the long collar points of his Hawaiian

  shirt spread over his jacket lapels— pachuquismo, their father yelled

  at him, you got a knife somewhere you punk you, but now he’d quit

  school and joined the Army and what was he doing, picking tomatoes

  on a government contract farm just like the braceros, so if that was

  representing the family, Diane didn’t care: and the world was upside

  down now and crazy and people just didn’t care and she was part of it.

  Because nobody cared, it was easy to get into the Fourth Avenue bars

  and get a Coke and then make it a Cuba libre, nobody cared, the bar-

  tenders and the soldiers and the older girls watched you and they were

  interested and you could see they liked it that you didn’t care either,

  that you didn’t give a hoot, you could see it in their warm eyes and

  smiles.

  “You can meet some strange people in here,” Danny said. “You can

  meet about anybody.”

  “I guess.”

  “I heard you could meet a morphodite in one bar. They come

  here.”

  “A what?”

  “A morphodite. That’s a woman that’s half a man.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I swear. You’d never know, to look at her. Him. It.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Diane said.

  He let her go at the song’s end with a little mock bow, and she

  slipped from his attention to get back to the girls; though it seemed the

  wrong way to proceed, she knew it was the way it was done.

  “He really likes me,” one of them was saying. Her hair fell over her

  eye the way Veronica Lake’s did, or anyway you were supposed to

  think that. “I know he does.”

  “Oh sure,” another, a blonde, replied. “Khaki-wacky,” she said to

  Diane, but for the other girl to hear.

  “Don’t you tell me,” the other said. “You’re no better. You’re more

  khaki-wacky than I’ll ever be.”

  “You clap your trap.”

  “Lucy Loose-pants.”

  The others were laughing and half rising from their seats to cover

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  their friends and keep them from being heard. The khaki-wacky one

  looked over to where the sailors sat together and gave them a little

  brave wave, mostly for her friends’ sake, just to show them that what-

  ever she was, she was going to be it unashamed. Diane stayed in her

  seat. The girls were all about her age but seemed to her skilled hunt-

  resses, chasing uniforms with a single-minded intensity that seemed

  hot and cold at the same time.

  “I’m getting a button tonight,” the Veronica Lake one said as they

  pulled her back into her seat. “No bout adout it.”

  “Oooh, hotsy-totsy.” The blonde blew and shook her hand, as

  though the matter were too hot to touch. The other looked away, cold-

  eyed, exploring the ice in her drink with the straw. Diane listened, a

  little afraid they might start questioning her. She knew they were after

  buttons, and had heard what getting one was supposed to mean, what

  you had to do. I’ll do it but you have to give me one thing. She’d heard

  that the fiercest girls carried nail scissors in their bags just to get them

  with. The band started up again, a slow sweet number. Though she

  hadn’t seen him come up behind her, she felt Danny the pilot lean close

  to her shoulder.

  “Hey, sport model.”

  She turned to him a little coolly. It was rude to make reference to a

  person’s height or weight or.

  “I’m better at this kind of tune,” he said. He really was cute. He

  offered her a hand.

  “Ding-dong,” she heard the blond girl say as they went away.

  The Duck finally evacuated near dawn, and the crowds that were let out

  into the streets deliquesced, some walking away under their own

  power, the taxi fleet bearing away the incompetent and their support-

  ers. Others remained to mill, unsatisfied even yet. Smash of a dropped

  bottle, girl-cries at a sudden thrown punch. One thing to do after such

  a night was to go out to the broad divided avenue that led to the park—

  Danny and Diane and the khaki-wacky girl, who’d snagged a soldier,

  did that—and wander down amid the flowers in the center plaza; over-

  head the royal palms lifted their shaggy heads on impossibly slim

  stalks, black against the dawn sky growing green.

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  “You know,” Danny said to her, “down the other way, I mean back

  that way, there’s some places where you can get a room. A nice room.

  They say. You don’t have to stay all night.”

  “Go on,” she said.

  “True.”

  She kept walking, looking straight on, head held up.

  “I mean,” Danny said, by way of withdrawing what hadn’t quite

  been a suggestion. They walked on, around them others, the last of the

  last, until they came to the big gates of the park, and inside everything

  was green and shadowed, and you could see (but you didn’t look too

  closely) couples on the benches and on the grass, the tip of a cigarette

  maybe alight. Star-scattered on the grass. You went on till you got to

  the zoo, because the idea was—Diane acting as though she’d long

  known it, though this was the first time, the first time she’d been out all

  night with the others, and Danny not paying attention yet, not being

  from around here, not knowing—the idea was to come down at dawn

  after a night at the Lucky Duck or the Bomber or Bimbo’s or places

  without famous names like those, to listen to the animals waking up.

  Diane and Danny fell out of the line, like weary soldiers hors de

  combat and giving up; they found a stone bench. For a while they

  talked—neither of them was much of a drinker, though they tried to

  be, and tired as they were from the night and the dancing they weren’t

  comatose like so many. He told her about where he had come from, far

  corner of the nation from hers. He was just out of flight training and

  would ship out for Pearl next week. Then who knows. Shouldn’t even

  have said that much. Diane felt an instant of huge grief, and then

  warmth, then something like relief, then it didn’t matter: there were so

  ma
ny gone and coming back and going out again, you wanted to care

  but you couldn’t care. Then they kissed, blending each into the other in

  a way that surprised Diane, because she’d kissed some boys but she’d

  never had this before, when what you felt moved to do was just what

  somebody else wanted to do, you were sure of it, like you couldn’t be

  wrong and didn’t need to worry. She pushed his hands away, but when

  obediently he withdrew them, she pulled them toward her again. The

  lions, awakened, started to greet the Sun their father; startled birds

  arose from the trees around them. Danny looked up, as though the

  wild sound came from above.

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  “What the hay?” he said, but she drew him back. Other animals

  began to make noises, animals you didn’t recognize and couldn’t imag-

  ine, grunting and hollering; the big cats screamed, the baboons too but

  differently; the macaws and great crested exotics shrieked and hooted

  as day came on. Some of the humans joined in, in mockery or just

  catching the spirit. The Shore Patrol was coming through the park,

  fanning out, looking for their own.

  They would get called V-girls in the papers and the comic magazines, in

  cartoons about willing girls with flipping skirts and lost undies amid

  wide-eyed delighted soldiers, and everybody could figure out that the V

  didn’t just stand for Victory, though the jokes about doing her part

  and all that were constant, and the girls would sometimes even deploy

  them against one another—they could be cruel to their competition in

  ways that would have surprised the boys they competed for. But they

  weren’t asking for money, or at any rate never considered those who

  did ask for money as belonging in the same sorority as themselves.

  Which made no difference to the civil and military authorities, since a

  girl could give a soldier a dose for free as easily as she could charge him

  for it (as the little booklets and the big posters filled with variants of

  the same cartoons kept telling him), and keeping the men off sick list

  and out of the infirmary was the big concern.

  The Button Babes (as they called themselves to themselves) did get a

  lot of money spent on them, which wasn’t the same thing. And anyway

  they were usually ready to spend it too if necessary, on their boys;

  except that you learned quickly that the offer didn’t have the right

  effect most of the time, maybe only late at night when nothing mat-

  tered, when it was like shooting fish in a barrel and not much more fun

  (that’s what Diane thought). No, the shiff-shiff of rubbed bills and

  clink of dollars and smaller coins had to go only one way, had to be

  shown and seen and then spent, the BBs didn’t ask why, or why the

  transactions did what they did, raised the temperature, rolled the ball

  faster. Cigar lifted in his grinning teeth as he peeled bills happily from

  a roll. Presents could go both ways, though: Kewpie dolls and snap-

  shots and locks of hair and things brought back from Hawaii or claimed

  to have been. Though that stuff wasn’t what the BBs meant when they

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  said a present. It’s okay, you’d say when some other girl marveled at

  how far you’d gone, the chance you’d taken, true story or not— It’s

  okay, I bought him a you know, a present. That foil-wrapped packet

  you could get for a quarter from the machine in the men’s toilet while

  another BB kept watch for you ( get one for me too, well heck just in

  case) or buy from a pharmacy unless the guy behind the counter was a

  fuddy-duddy and wouldn’t sell them to a female, even one with a gold

  ring on. All the servicemen got issued their hygiene packets, but most

  didn’t bring one along. So it was hard, but they were really scared of

  the clap, and even more scared of a good-bye baby, and the boys some-

  times didn’t remember or didn’t care, and most of the girls didn’t

  believe that the vinegar douche would work (or the one with Coke that

  the tougher girls claimed to use, all six ounces, warm, capped with a

  thumb while shaken, inserted), and anyway who was going to jump

  out of bed and into the john just at that moment, that precious moment,

  if you were even somewhere that had a john, or a bed.

  All theoretical to Diane, whose greatest fear was negotiating her

  absences from the house on the Heights just to get to be on the BB

  periphery, where she remained for a long time: till she proved to have

  something not all of them had, not even the wised-up ones, the slick

  chicks; a thing that some learned to envy and some to despise in her—

  it took Diane a long time herself to know it. Come summer she con-

  vinced her family to let her go with other students from her school to

  work weekends at Van Damme Aero outside the city, maybe a night

  shift sometimes if it was really called for, and then during the week too

  when school was over. To do her part. Her mother weeping in some

  nameless mix of shame and pride to see her in her overalls and ban-

  danna. If sometimes the hours she said she worked didn’t match the

  money in her pay envelope, well they didn’t need to count it, she was

  like a soldier now she said (clapping her lunch pail closed), and they

  had to trust her. Watchful as he was, her father always slept as deeply

  and lifelessly as his truck with the ignition off, the more soundly the

  later it grew (years afterward, alone in that house, he was going to die

  in a fire, awaking too late), and so he didn’t know what time she came

  in. What her mother heard she didn’t say.

  Out with the BBs she wore the same sloppy socks and big sweaters

  they did, sweaters that slipped almost from your shoulder, so that you

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  had to tug it back in place slowly now and then as if not thinking about

  it, as if wholly absorbed in the flyboy’s face that you were holding with

  your eyes, except that his eyes didn’t stay with your eyes, but stayed

  with you yes. It was flyboys that were the prized ones. They got just as

  crazy as the other boys, who were crazy enough; but they seemed to

  like girls who weren’t silly and who didn’t talk all the time, who could

  just let a moment like that (eyes, sweater, silence) come and stay. That

  was what Diane learned to do (by accident, sort of, at first just tongue-

  tied and keeping erect and still out of shy fear) and got good at: and

  when she did it and knew it worked she felt a dark sweet sensation that

  spread like a stain from its starting point, that point below, and spread

  all through her, and that he seemed to share. Just being seen and look-

  ing back, unblinking like women in the movies, like Rita Hayworth.

  The BBs wore thin silk scarves at their throats, and only they knew

  what the colors meant, what achievements or conquests—pink, white,

  blue, orange—but there was no color for causing that: it was unname-

  able, unclaimable, and the only one she counted. The BBs saw her do it

  without showing that they were watching her.

  Fliers, because fliers could die. Of course any of them in uniform


  could die, except the clerks and the janitors and the orderlies, but the

  flyboys seemed closer to it, and more liable to die. As though surviving

  or fighting or marching or other things were the jobs of others, and

  dying, or taking that chance on dying, was theirs. It melted your heart:

  she’d always heard people say that, and now she knew that it was a real

  feeling you could have. But you heard of women, not V-girls and way

  on past girls who asked for money, who married fliers because of the

  government life insurance, $10,000 they said; and the flier was the one

  to go for, because you had the best chance of collecting quickly. Diane

  decided there was no truth to that.

  Danny was a flyboy, but only in a way. He was back from his stint

  at Pearl now and training pilots at the Naval Air Station, going up with

  the student pilots in an old Bull fighter plane that he seemed to both

  cherish and hold in contempt, like a feckless older brother. So nobody

  was going to shoot Danny down, and he got a lot of leave, and pretty

  soon he was the only one Diane went with to the Duck and other

  places. He didn’t realize she’d chosen him and forgone all others, and

  she didn’t tell him; and because she thought the BBs might reveal it—

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  she knew which ones, and why they would, that cruelty that shot

  through their solidarity, it could catch you like a pin left in a satin

  dress—she started to draw him away from the places that that crowd

  went to and toward others. And maybe it was because they were alone

  together away from the BBs and the soldiers they followed, but their

  feelings, hers and Danny’s, intensified in ways that surprised Diane,

  she hadn’t expected it, becoming something not so much like a game

  anymore, and when he talked again about those rooms you could get

  she asked him whether he was pretending, just to tease her, or whether

  there really were such places and what they were like, nice or nasty. He

  told her, and he told the truth, and he never insisted; he pretended

  along with her that they were just considering a funny thing that existed

  in the world, places that others, people who weren’t he and she, might

  use or go to. But once they were actually there in one of them (not nice,

  exactly, not nasty but bare and cheerless certainly, she made him leave