by John Crowley
have been grief but that had also begun to seem like it might be regret.
Diane gave her a hug and lifted Sylvia’s chin the way men tenderly
lifted the chins of weeping girls in the movies, be brave, but Sylvia
wasn’t having it, so Diane wished her luck and all the happiness in the
world, took her case and hatbox from the back and headed through the
throng to the pier where the immense aircraft carrier was tied up. After
a long time the crew and the fliers and everyone on board came crowd-
ing the rail, a vast distance above the people who waved and called,
moms and dads and girlfriends and wives. A band played, its music
coming and going with the breeze. She saw Danny, amazed that it was
possible to identify him, it was as certain as anything, and she waved
wildly and he waved back to her, and then there was nothing left to do
but wait—even when it began to move, the carrier was going to take
forever to be gone. When Danny had to leave the high deck from which
he had looked down on her, not waving but smiling and holding her
eyes—she could tell that he was looking right at her—Diane didn’t
turn away; she sat down on her case and watched the ship, which could
now definitely be seen to be moving off, its tugs busy around it (Danny
wanted her to call the ship she but Diane couldn’t, it was silly). Its
escort, too, oilers and other ships visible now standing out to sea,
creeping out from other berths to be beside it.
The ship went on growing smaller very slowly. The crowd around
her melted away. She remembered from school a teacher saying that
you can tell the world is round because ships sailing away from shore
sink over the curve of it and disappear, first their big bodies, then the
funnels and the tiptops of their masts. Good-bye. Good-bye. She
couldn’t see that, though, because the haze out at sea erased the ship
long before it could go beyond the horizon, drawing after it the other
ships. Diane felt the thread of connection between her and Danny
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 317
drawn out infinitely thin, until it broke with a hurt to her heart she’d
known she’d have to feel, but worse than she thought it would be.
It was late in the afternoon now. She got up and took the suitcase
and the other bag and started walking toward the streetcars; took the
car to Union Station, where she checked her two bags, seeming as
heavy as gold by now. Van Damme Aero ran their own bus service
from the station around to the plant; she’d taken the bus often, bright
yellow like a school bus, Van Damme’s slim cartoon plane painted on
its side, as though pushing the roly-poly bus along on its own curling
speed line. Tomorrow first thing she’d go out there. In her handbag
were her marriage license and birth certificate. She’d worked there
before, on the Sword bomber, and she thought they’d give her a full-
time job in a minute, the wife of an airman. For a time she’d leave out
the part about being pregnant.
When her mother was eighteen and just enrolled in nursing school,
first in her family to go that far, she’d found out she was pregnant,
with Pablo as he would come to be, and she’d dropped out to marry
and have her baby and take care of her man. And no matter that
Pablito was everything to her, sun around which her planet turned,
face always to him, she would still press her hand to her heart in grief
and hurt when she thought of the degree she could have got, the white
cap she’d have worn, the doctors’ offices and hospitals she could have
worked in. Diane in her senior year had won the scholarship to St.
Anne’s College for Women, the letter was there at home on the mantel
next to the photo of Pablo in uniform. So Diane couldn’t go home, tell
them that all of that was for nothing, that she’d got a baby, been mar-
ried by a JP, was going to be an Allotment Annie and sit on her culo
just getting bigger and cashing her fifty dollars a month. When she
had the job she’d get a room, somewhere. Her mother never came
downtown, her friends wouldn’t tell. It was as far as her thinking had
reached.
She ate a hot dog at the station buffet, thinking she needed some-
thing, some nutrition, the baby too, but almost before she finished it
she knew it had been a bad idea, and she spent some time in the ladies’
lounge till it was all expelled. She wiped her lips with the stiff toilet
paper and drank water from a paper cup. The attendant, small and
dark as a troll, watched her with hostile eyes, proffering a towel, but
318 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
that would mean a tip. She left the toilets and sat in a broad leather
armchair in the lounge and for a while knew nothing.
When she woke she somehow knew, even in that place without win-
dows, that darkness had come.
Where would she go now? Everyone knew that every place you
might look for somewhere to stay was overwhelmed with applicants,
that every shed and backhouse had a tenant in it, people were sleeping
on the cement floors of garages and in the basements of unfinished
houses roofed over with tar paper; hotels were impossible, even if
Diane had dared to check into one all by herself; the YWCA was full
every day. She could stay right here, in this chair that had seemed to
become her friend, but she felt sure that the attendant would put her
out before dawn. She got to her feet.
She could walk for a while. Something could turn up. She did walk,
one second per step, wearing away an hour and another hour. Evening
was soothing, the dark blue sky reminding her of childhood and trips
downtown to the movies. Even as she thought this she saw ahead a
movie theater, its great marquee projecting over the street, its tall sign
rising with the name vista and the lines of lights chasing themselves
around the edges. A lot of people milling around out front, a lot of them
kids it looked like. Diane didn’t notice the title of the show playing; she
was only drawn to the booth where tickets were sold, as though to the
gatekeeper of a realm of safety and refuge. Twenty cents. She passed
inside. More children, coming out of the curtained entrance to the audi-
torium, going in again, sitting on the steps to the balcony looking weary
or dejected, or running wildly. An usherette in pursuit like a comic cop.
Diane went into the darkness and found a seat; the feature was just
starting. It was called No Room at the Inn. Diane knew the names of
the young people who would play the main parts but hadn’t seen them
in a picture before. The music covered her and filled her at once, like a
kind of warm nourishing syrup, and she sank lower in her seat. Snow
was falling in a dark city, people hurrying through the streets. The two
young people had just arrived from somewhere else, they had an old car
that was almost out of gas; she wore a white kerchief tied under her
chin that seemed both humble and rich; he was unshaven and his pale
eyes were worried. He had a job at a war plant and they were going to
do all right but they couldn’t find a plac
e to live. The landladies and old
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 319
men in carpet slippers who opened the door to them were mean and
tight-lipped, or kindly but helpless. The girl was pregnant! They needed
someplace safe and warm. The car busted an old tire and ran out of gas
at the same time, which was funny and was supposed to be funny, you
could tell, and it made you think everything would actually come out
all right. They started walking in the snow and he was worried and
gentle and she carried a little suitcase. They went to a sinister motel
where a single light burned and you could hear laughter of the wrong
kind, and a night clerk (Diane recognized the greasy-faced actor from a
dozen pictures) got the wrong idea about the girl and the guy, and asked
if they wanted to stay the whole night, and they were so nice they didn’t
even get what was going on or where they were, which was funny too
for a minute and then horrid, you wanted them to get out of there. They
went on through the snow and the hurrying crowds. Diane fell asleep.
When she woke up, the man and his wife had somehow found a place to
stay, only it was almost a barn, a shed with a donkey looking in the
window, and it was funny again but sweetly serious too: something
about the light or the music told you. The old man with a foreign accent
who rented the space to them and helped them out talked to them about
freedom and decency in a world gone wrong, his white hair like a halo.
It was Christmas. Kids came caroling down the streets, singing about
Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men. As though you were a visitor, some-
one come to call or to investigate, you went into the yard and through
the gate and up to the little shed, and there in a corner in a made-up bed
of blankets is the young woman, and glowing in her arms, revealed to
you as though you’d crept up to take a peek, the baby. Just before that—
just as the carollers came in to see—Diane all of a sudden got the idea
of the picture, no room at the inn, which she hadn’t got all along because
it had made her think only of herself and Danny and where she’d go and
what she’d do. Her heart heaved and she started to sob, that awful won-
derful sobbing that can happen in this darkness, where with all these
people you were alone and spoken to.
The usherette of the Vista—the only one on duty late—was having a
hell of a night. She’d come to believe that all the human beings in the
city without a house of their own were sleeping in the movies. Or they
320 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
just left their kids there to watch the show, and told them Mommy’d be
back later when her shift was done, just stay there. Damn shame.
Shame of the nation, she thought, these were war workers, doing what
needed to be done, and no place for them or their families to go. Kids
falling asleep in heaps on the stairs, picking butts out of the ashtrays to
try out. When the owl show let out and the place finally turned its
lights out at 2 a.m., the kids would still be there, and she’d have to put
them out and line them up on the curb to wait. Then there were the
older ones, “teenagers” they got called nowadays, in the back rows
necking or worse, she’d seen some rather striking things and not been
very descriptive about them when talking to the manager, who thought
it was swell management to leave the whole thing to her for these last
hours of the night. Every hour on the hour it was required of her to
check each of the four thermostats in the theater, see that they all read
right. One was up on the wall behind the last row of seats, and that’s
where she damn well went, flashlight aglow so they saw her coming,
and still they said awful things to her. Just doing my job, said under
her breath because after all the damn picture was playing, not that
these types cared.
And where did they get the bottles they smuggled in, the smell of
booze was distinct in the auditorium, floating here to there in the stale
air like a wandering cloud. It wasn’t her affair, except when the boys
got into fights she had to stop or she had to hold some retching girl’s
head over the toilet, too young to drink, too young to be here, without
anywhere else to go. If she kicked them out, what would become of
them? Churches should stay open, maybe that’d help.
She’d already had it when in the littered and foul-smelling ladies’
she heard some kind of moaning from a closed stall. What now? She
knocked on the door with her flashlight, a harsh sound, and from
inside came a startled cry. Then no more.
Something really wrong.
“All right in there?”
No answer, and she looked down at the tiles and could see what
was certainly blood on the floor of the stall, which the someone inside
had tried to wipe up and failed, oh Lord.
“What is it? Open the door. I can help.” She could? Help by doing
what, exactly, for who, a murdered girl, attacked, raped? The small
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 321
sounds came again, but the door wasn’t opened. She waited. There was
some movement, and the latch was lifted but no more. The usherette
pushed it open.
“Oh my Lord.”
“I’m sorry.”
Blood everywhere, all over her lap, her legs, the toilet, a pile of tis-
sues reddened. The woman, child, girl, was gray, as though all that
colored her had drained away.
“It came out, all this blood,” she said.
“I got to call an ambulance,” said the usherette. “You wait. Don’t
move.” In the movies they always said that, for the first time she knew
why.
“Don’t,” said Diane. “Please don’t. It’s over. I think it is.”
“Dear, you could die. I know so. Don’t move and I’ll come back.
The phone’s right there.”
Diane looked up at the usherette, whose great breasts strained the
uniform she wore, little pillbox hat absurd on her wide wings of hair.
Horror and pity in her face.
“I want to go home,” she said. “Please.”
3
The Bomb Bay was nothing but an extra building not far from the
main assembly plant that had lost its use as more and more Pax
components were being built in other plants in other places. It was
square, low, and window-less, with a makeshift stage hung with
bunting; it was decorated as though for a high school cotillion in crepe
paper streamers and silver and gold moons sprinkled with shiny stuff
(actually duralumin dust, produced when Pax parts were cut or drilled,
but it glittered prettily in the light of a mirrored ball that turned overhead
and reflected the lights). The main reason for the Bomb Bay’s existence
was that it was big enough to hold a crowd, bigger than any place in the
city, and you could drink there. The Oklahoma dry laws came and went
and came again in Ponca City, but the Bomb Bay had been established as
a private club of which all the employees of Van Damme Aero were auto-
matically members—just show your badge at the door, when there was
somebody there to check�
�and the church ladies and dour legislators
could go hang. The trucks rolled in from the Coast bringing the Lucky
Lager, the unrationed tequila came from south of the border, and the rest
of the array behind the long bar when and if. Waiters were in short supply;
best get your drink from the bar and carry it to a paper-covered table.
“I’d like,” Diane said—her cheeks flushed and eyes alight as though
she’d already consumed it—“a Cuba libre, please.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 323
“I’ll have the same,” Prosper said, not quite sure what it was. The
volunteer barman filled two glasses with ice and snapped the tops from
two bottles of Coca-Cola. He added a shot of clear rum to each glass,
and then the Coke.
“Wha,” said Prosper.
“Should have a lemon,” the barman said, “but we’re fresh out.”
Diane picked up the glasses—both his and hers, without hesitation
or inquiry, which endeared her to him immediately, and brought them
to a table.
“Why Cuba libre?” he asked.
She lifted one shoulder fetchingly. She was a different person here
than in the plant. “It means Free Cuba,” she said. “Maybe from that
war?”
“Remember the Maine, ” Prosper said and lifted his glass to her.
The band was just setting up on the stage, the drummer tapping
and tightening his drumheads. There was a trio of lady singers, like the
Andrews Sisters, going over sheet music.
Diane told him (he asked, he wanted to know) about Danny, her
guy, flying a Hellcat in the Pacific. She got V-mail from him, not often:
little funny notes about coconuts and palm trees and grass skirts, not
what you really wanted to know, because of course he couldn’t say. She
lifted her dark drink from another war, and looked at nothing.
“So he,” Prosper began, just a nudge, he had nothing to say; and
though it didn’t draw her eyes to him she told him more, remembering
more. The Lucky Duck. The journey across the desert. At last the lost
baby.
“Aw,” he said. “Aw Diane.”
She shrugged again, a different kind. “I really only knew him a
couple of weeks. Not even a month, and I wasn’t with him unless he
could get a pass.”
“Testing, testing,” said the bandleader into the microphone.
“I can almost not remember what he looks like. Sometimes I dream
