Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  of him, but it’s never him. It’s like different actors playing him.”

  “Hello hello,” said the bandleader. “Hello and welcome.”

  Diane downed her drink as though Coke was all it was, and

  crunched an ice cube in her small white teeth. “We weren’t even really

  married,” she said. “Not by what the Catholic Church says.”

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  “Oh?”

  “That’s what my mother thinks. Didn’t count.”

  “Oh.”

  She smiled at him, her funny life. Around them men and women

  were taking the tables. Prosper lifted a hand to people he knew: press-

  men from the office, engineers who’d appeared in the Aero, Shop 128

  women. More women than men.

  The bandleader, shoe-blacking hair and boutonniere, at last turned

  to his men and women—half the horns and clarinets were women—

  and with his little wand beat out the rhythm. All at once the place

  changed, filled with that clamor, always so much louder than it was on

  the radio.

  “Like a school dance,” Diane said. “The girls dance with the girls

  till the boys get brave.” She’d begun to move in her seat as though

  dancing sitting down, and then without apology or hesitation she got

  up, twiddled a good-bye to Prosper, and went to the floor, where in a

  moment another woman was with her, jitterbugging tentatively. Pros-

  per, new to all this except as it could be seen in the movies, felt that

  dancing itself must be a female endeavor or art, the men diminished

  and graceless where in other realms of life they were the sure ones.

  Not that guy in the flowered shirt, though, shined shoes twinkling.

  The three women singers, their identically coiffed heads together,

  sang in brassy harmony, reading from their sheet music, they hadn’t

  yet got this one under their belts, about the Atchison, Topeka, and

  Santa Fe.

  Big cheers for the local road, and the atmosphere intensified, but

  when the song was done Diane met Prosper over at the bar to which

  he’d repaired.

  “Wowser,” she said. “It seems so long.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I was dancing last.” She touched his elbow. “Thanks.”

  So they had another Cuba libre, which seemed stronger than the

  first, and they sat again and drank. Whenever the right song was played

  Diane would pat his hand and flash him a smile and head for the floor,

  and Prosper could see that she moved differently from the others, at

  once forceful and supple, a snap to her waist and behind that no one

  else had; the men were taking her away from the women now and

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  doing their best, but when the bandleader yelled “Ay-yi-yi!” and started

  a rhumba they fell away, all but the guy in the flowered shirt.

  Whenever she came back to sit with Prosper, though, she’d take his

  hand under the table and hold it. Surprised at first, he thought he was

  supposed to figure out what she meant by this, if it was a secret signal,

  but soon decided it didn’t mean anything, her face never turned to his

  to share any secret, she just did it: maybe it just meant that she’d dance

  with him if he could, or that she was dancing with him there as they

  sat. And it wasn’t late when she yawned and said she’d had enough,

  really. He walked with her back across the still-warm tarmac, around

  the ever-burning main buildings, to the women’s dorm.

  “So have you seen your friend the inspector?” she asked as they

  walked.

  “Oh. No. Not really. I mean she.” Since Bunce had come and then

  gone again, Connie had seemed to lift herself above the plane where he

  and the rest of the world lived, her eyes somehow looking far off,

  toward where he’d gone, from where he’d return. “She’s working over-

  time, I guess.”

  “Well.” She turned to him at the door past which at this hour he

  could not go. “That was fun.”

  “I liked it. We’ll do it again.”

  She aimed an imaginary pistol at him, one eye closed, and fired:

  you’re on.

  In her bed in her familiar room again she lay thinking, listening to

  her roommate’s breathing in the other bed.

  She thought what a nice fellow that was, how modest and funny

  and honest, seeming to be honest anyway, without any designs on her

  as the nuns used to say, easy enough to spot those.

  She thought about Danny far away, trying to say a prayer for him,

  trying to remember in more than a dreamlike way his face, his laughter

  at his own jokes, his touch. She should write to him.

  She thought about V-mail. About her mother fetching the little

  forms from the post office so that she could write one to Danny to tell

  him that she’d lost the baby. How many sheets she’d begun before she

  could say it plainly. His answer back, a month later, the dread with

  which she’d opened it, afraid of his grief, disappointment, anger even,

  though that was crazy to think, at her failure somehow. And his answer

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  when it came not any of those things, just telling her it was okay, he’d

  come home and they’d make a dozen babies together, look ahead not

  back. She thought maybe you couldn’t go to war, couldn’t fly a flimsy

  little plane over an ocean, unless you could keep your head and your

  smile like that. The little shrunken gray V-mail letter, like a voice heard

  speaking at a distance.

  She got up quietly from her bed and went to the window, having

  thought now too much. The sky seemed to have been heated to glow-

  ing by the plant and its lights. When she was well enough after the

  miscarriage to go to work again at Van Damme, they were offering

  jobs out here, and Diane signed on. She’d make more money and be far

  from that town, those places, from the movie-land hope that any day

  he’d come flying in again. Far from her mother’s great sad reproachful

  pitying eyes, big enough to drown in. But now and then she wished,

  well she didn’t know what she wished. Ay mamí. She put her hot cheek

  against the cool of the glass and waited for it all to pass.

  Drawn through the nation, and passing somewhere near Ponca City, is

  that line below which everyone’s glad to see furious summer depart

  and the cooler weather come. Autumn nights the height of felicity,

  sweet as June up north.

  Pancho Notzing on such a night approached the Van Damme Aero

  Community Center, which formed the middle box of a big plain build-

  ing; the box on the left was the men’s dormitory, the one on the right

  the women’s. Both used the Center, entering from their own wings:

  Pancho was reminded of the great meetinghouses of the Shakers, to

  which men and women came by different ways, to meet and dance and

  praise God in ecstasies.

  He carried his jacket, neatly folded, over one arm. There were many

  on the path with him, coming from the houses of Henryville, from

  their suppers at the Dining Commons, from the far town, in groups

  and twos and threes, going in by the double doors, which gave out

  breaths of music when the
y opened and then closed again. Within,

  there were not all those satisfactions and challenges and innocent

  delights for the flesh and the spirit that would be offered, expected,

  assumed in the true Harmonious City: but there were more of them

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  than Pancho had known in any human institution he had ever been

  part of. Pancho Notzing believed, though he dared not say it aloud

  until it began to come true—if it ever in his lifetime even began to

  come true—that enough human gratification could actually change the

  world, the weather, and the earth. Make the crops more abundant,

  fruits sweeter; the tundra bloom with grains. The days more provident.

  The nights and the air like this.

  Well maybe it could begin. Maybe—Pancho’s heart dilated at the

  thought—maybe it already had. Could it be that the heedless extrava-

  gances of war funding had combined with the genius of a single man,

  Henry Van Damme, to enact, to produce in concrete block and glass

  brick and Homasote and organization charts, what he, Pancho Notz-

  ing, had only been able to dream of and plan and think about? Pancho’d

  planned, down to the minutiae, for human happiness and its provision,

  because it was in the minutiae that Harmony existed or did not. Henry

  Van Damme had planned likewise, and planned well: Pancho simply

  could not deny it, however many faults he could find. For a moment,

  the first in his life, Pancho felt an impulse to hero worship. Henry Van

  Damme might be a Bestopian greater than himself.

  But perhaps he was only induced to think so because of the present

  happiness he felt.

  He came to the doors of the Community Center and entered in.

  The walls of the wide entrance were covered with announcements

  printed and lettered, stenciled and handwritten. Tonight the Pax Play-

  ers were doing scenes from Shakespeare; tickets were free, but the pur-

  chase of a War Savings Stamp was urged. The debate team was

  practicing tonight for its upcoming meet with Panhandle A&M, the

  thesis being “Farmers Should Not Be Draft Exempt.” The course in

  Small Engine Repair was canceled for lack of interest. The Photogra-

  phy Club expedition to Osage Country was tomorrow. The movie

  tonight was The Arizona Kid with Roy Rogers.

  While people turned off to this or that door or stair leading to vari-

  ous activities, Pancho kept on until he heard the echoey piano, already

  beginning. He came to the studio door and opened it. No it was no

  credit to Henry Van Damme that he had brought into this unlovely

  state so many people, mixed their multiple passions together in combi-

  nations too many to calculate. But here (he thought) they were, and

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  what their freedom and Association could body forth was up to them.

  To us, he thought.

  The piano had begun a waltz, but the instructor halted the piano

  player while she sorted her class into couples. She turned to Pancho,

  entering with solemn tread as into a church, and waved to him. He’d

  thought, when first he’d seen her here, that she was not someone who

  merely closely resembled the divine Clara Bow, It girl, freedom embod-

  ied, but the movie star herself: it was absurd, impossible, but heart

  lifting for a moment. And the real person who took his hand and wel-

  comed him in had the advantage over Clara—Clara, his great secret

  impossible love, his Dulcinea—because she was after all a warm, living

  woman actually present to him.

  “Hi there, Mr. Notzing,” she said in Clara’s own insinuating gay

  whine. “We’re making up partners, but we’ve an odd number tonight,

  so I’ll be yours, all right? We’re going to start with a waltz, all right,

  and then we’re going to try guess what?”

  He smiled and went to her and didn’t try to guess.

  Over at the Bomb Bay meanwhile, Prosper and Diane were at their

  table, gossiping happily about the plant and people each of them knew,

  he certainly was a talker, he was like Danny in that respect though

  Danny was more dismissive of things that girls noticed. So it seemed.

  Danny’d listen but pretty quickly his eyes would go away. Why was she

  thinking about Danny anyway? She got up to get herself another Cuba

  libre, and one for Prosper too.

  After a while the band finished what Diane thought was a pretty

  short set of numbers and claimed they’d be back. Cigarette smoke and

  the day’s heat hung in the air. A smell of petroleum prevailed through-

  out.

  “Know what would be great?” she said.

  “What?”

  “A drive. A night drive. Cool. Did you know there’s a river just over

  there a ways?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You don’t explore. Did you know there’s Indians very close by?”

  “Yes I knew that.”

  “I’d like a drive,” she said.

  At that moment Prosper in amazement saw Pancho Notzing come

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  onto the floor, with a blond woman taller than himself on his arm, a

  woman dressed for dancing.

  “I don’t drive, myself,” he said. He intended to make it sound like a

  choice.

  “Well I do,” she said. “Where I come from, everybody does.” She

  regarded him with solemn certitude. “Every body.”

  Prosper made no answer to that but said, “Well if you want to take

  a walk, maybe we can get a car.”

  “Swell,” she said. “One more drink.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh Prosper,” she said rising. “Don’t be a better-notter.”

  The band was playing a waltz as Prosper and Diane went out, and

  the three women were singing mournfully about love and loss, and

  Pancho and his friend were turning each other with regal care.

  The moon looked huge, the plant was far behind, the river—there was a

  river—was a trickle at the end of a dirt road, they’d almost slid off the

  bank and into it. Prosper’s heart had turned cold when they’d discov-

  ered the key of Pancho’s Zephyr actually already in the ignition; he’d

  supposed without much thought that they wouldn’t be able to find it,

  and the plan could be given up. She’d driven just fine, though, mostly;

  she never could discern the switch for the headlights, but the night was

  almost bright as day.

  It was cooler, truly: a little wind in the oaks, night birds and bugs

  he didn’t know. From where they were the great illuminated refinery

  didn’t look like an industrial installation close at hand but like a huge

  city far away. A flare of orange gas burned in the air, beneath the moon.

  Prosper and Diane sat close together, she leaning on him, he against

  the door.

  “Well,” she said. “Well well well.”

  He’d been telling her something about himself, the places he’d gone

  (not many) and the people he’d known. Also, because she wanted to

  know, about the women who had taken up with him, short time or

  longer. She listened with care.

  “It almost sounds,” she said, “like they picked you out.”

  He shrugged.

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O H N C R O W L E Y

  “I mean, you. I think you attract a special type.”

  “Like some women like soldiers. Or airmen.”

  That made her laugh, unashamed. He knew she wanted more, but

  he kept mum, suggesting it wouldn’t be chivalrous: she could think

  there was nothing to tell if she wanted, or that there was.

  Maybe to show she was ready to hear anything, she began to tell

  him about the Button Babes, and how they’d go after their prizes, the

  things they were willing to do to get them. She put her faintly bobbing

  head close to his to tell him: “You wouldn’t bleeve what they did. Some

  of them.”

  “Well you tell me.”

  She considered this invitation. He was now her sole support; if he’d

  been able to slip out the door she would have slid down across the seat

  like a bag of meal. “Okay,” she said. “Have you ever heard of people

  doing this?”

  She whispered hotly in his ear, not quite intelligibly, her lashes flick-

  ing his brow, laughter distorting her words as much as drink and

  embarrassment.

  “I’ve never heard of that,” he said. He was lying, and that was

  wrong, and he knew it, but he did it anyway. “Never.”

  “Never? See?”

  “What did they call that?”

  “It doesn’t have a name. It has a number.” She drew it on his chest.

  “How exactly would you do it?”

  “Well see I don’t know because I wasn’t like that, but they said they

  did and they even said it was fun.”

  “They did.”

  She reared back a little, as though he was doubting her. “Wull

  yes.”

  “I mean I guess, but personally I’d have to see,” he said, and she

  seemed just drunk enough not to guess where he was carrying this, or

  maybe he was all wet and she knew just where they were headed. His

  usual cunning was also a little blunted by those Cuba libres. He turned

  to put his arm across her lap.

  “They did everything,” she said thoughtfully. “But just to not get a

  baby.”

  “There’s other ways not to get a baby.”

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  “I know,” she said, as though well of course she did. And for a

  moment she regarded him with goofy bliss, and for all he knew he did

  the same. He’d put before her a choice between the safe but unlikely

  and the regular but risky, and then taken away the risk of the regular,

  so it was not a choice but a banquet. Rather, he’d got her to put it