by John Crowley
say yes. He’d have to advise her not to. If he was her.
His heart hurt. Actually, even though the heart beat hard, it was the
muscles of his chest that hurt, and the bronchia and throat through
which the burning breath rushed; but he’d have said it was his heart.
He reached the cafeteria, the vast spread of tables and people, not so
crowded though at this hour, and after a minute they were easy to
spot, the four of them at their table, it was as though the eyes of the
other diners there, turning toward them, pointed them out to him.
Well so what, he thought. What he had, or would have, was a son,
maybe a daughter, growing up somewhere, at one end of the nation or
the other, and nobody’d know he was the father, nobody but Diane
and he, and even she might talk herself into forgetting one day, though
he hoped not, it wouldn’t be fair.
Danny’d never know, but he knew. He knew what men don’t know,
what they don’t get to know. They think they know but they don’t
know, because they aren’t told, because they don’t ask. But he knew,
more than all of them, and better than that, he knew that he knew.
And that was enough, would be enough, for now.
“Hi, Martha,” he said, a little breathless. She’d watched him make
his way across the floor with a kind of forbearance, not unkind, smil-
ing even. She lifted her face in inquiry. “So. Can I ask you a ques-
tion?”
She nodded and pointed to the chair opposite her, and he felt her
eyes on him as he maneuvered to sit, unlock his braces, and turn to her,
now an ordinary man. Then somehow his nerve went and he didn’t
know how to begin. “So,” he said again. She pulled out a cork-tipped
cigarette and he hastened to find his lighter and light it for her.
“So when’d you first fly?” he asked at last.
5
Summer 1936. Swimming was over for the afternoon and the girls
were sitting on the dock or out on the slimy wooden float, looking
down into the gray-green water or over toward the prickle of pines
across the lake or at each other. Their wool suits of black, or navy
edged with white, drying in the late sun: still damp tomorrow when the
girls would have to squirm back into them for morning swim.
It came as a noise first, from where they couldn’t tell because the
bowl of the lake bounced sound from rim to rim unplaceably: new girls
were known to wake up crying out in the night when the Delaware &
Hudson night train passed miles away—it sounded like it was going to
go right through the cabin.
Martha was the first to see it, turning and tilting as it rose over the
pines in a way that seemed uncertain to her then but wouldn’t later
when she knew what the pilot was about. High up it caught the full
sun, and white as it was it almost disappeared now and then against
the sky, then came clear and solidified as it swooped down around the
south end of the lake to approach the lake longwise.
“It’s a seaplane,” someone said, and now you could see that it was;
instead of wheels it seemed to be shod in big soft slippers. Martha
watched in awe as it came down fearlessly onto the lake’s surface,
seeming as light as a falling leaf and yet huge with power, the sound
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 341
enormous now, the propeller nearly invisible in its speed. Then it struck
the water—they gasped or cried out, but not Martha, as it seemed to
bounce off and settle again, this time opening a long white rip in the
gray fabric of the lake surface. Martha’d never seen anything so taking
in all her life. She’d seen airplanes in the movies, where (like acrobats
in the circus) they seemed merely impossible; even though you knew
they were real they didn’t seem it. But this one landing with negligent
skill on the water—throttling its engine now and lifting softly in relax-
ation, turning toward the dock of the boys’ camp on the other shore—
it was real, what it had done was real and the pilot could have made a
mistake and come to grief and hadn’t; she could hear it, the power it
expended, she could even smell it.
The girls stood and watched it even after it had tied up at the boys’
dock and sat high and still and innocent there like any old skiff. Of
course everything that occurred in or around the boys’ camp was of
interest. A long time afterward Martha would think how intense it had
been, the two camps so near but with a great gulf fixed between, like
life as it was lived then—the signals and displays from one side meant
for the other side to see and decode, the thousand plans laid every
summer but never acted on to cross the gap. It amazed her to look back
and think how many camps there were in the great north woods like
hers, boys divided from girls not far away. At Martha’s camp the two
had occupied spits or points that had seemed to strain toward each
other, like Romeo and Juliet, like two bodies in movie seats; getting
closer too over the years (so it seemed to Martha as she came back
summer after summer and her legs grew longer). As though all of their
cool nights and hot days and their talk and the summer’s flickering
endless contests about who had said a cruel thing behind whose back
and who was snooty and who was whiny and who was definitely a
part-time Liz were all caused, like a reflection, by what happened
across the lake where the boys fought and played mumblety-peg and
ganged up to humiliate the weak and snapped one another’s bottoms
with towels. Martha knew they did all these things because her older
brother before his illness had gone to the same camp at the lake of the
woods.
They could see the swarm of boys around the plane then. A tall
counselor made his way amid them to where the pilot was just then
342 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
climbing out—he seemed to be wearing a Panama hat, of all things—
and the two of them met and shook hands, and the boys gathered
around the two and the girls could see nothing more. After a brief time
the pilot got up on the plane again, importuned obviously by the boys
asking questions and admiring the craft, and with a wave like Lind-
bergh, he shut himself in; then after a solemn silent moment the engine
started and the propeller kicked once, seemed to travel backward,
kicked again as the engine nacelle blew white smoke, then sped to a blur
in that way a propeller has, hysterical and self-satisfied at once.
What had happened—they learned at supper—was that a boy in the
camp, a first-year, had got bit by a copperhead, and they had no serum,
and so they’d radio’d out, and the plane had brought it in. Just like a
movie—snake, serum, radio, plane. It was thrilling but not as moving
to Martha as the plane itself, as it turned toward them—not toward
them, of course, toward the length of the lake, to take off again. But at
that, somehow all at once and without thought, the girls started waving
and calling and jumping up and down; and the plane seemed to pause
a moment, and then glided with an air of curious interest toward their
/>
dock while the girls cheered in triumph.
It was a Stinson V-77 Gullwing, though that too she’d only learn
later, when she flew one. This summer afternoon she only stood trans-
fixed, but at the front of the pack, as Pete Bigelow (that would turn out
to be his name) stilled his engines to a mutter, and pushed his door
open, and asked if anybody wanted to go for a ride. None of the others
would—not in their bathing costumes, maybe not ever—but Martha
grabbed a robe and her espadrilles and presented herself before she
even knew she had.
“Two dollars,” said Pete, tilting back the Panama. He was older
and uglier than she thought he’d be. Two dollars was a lot of money:
all that was in Martha’s account at the camp store.
“Pay when we get back?” she said, and—seeing her there with no
money, no pockets to put it in—Pete Bigelow laughed, and reached out
a sun-red arm to pull her up and in, just as Martha glimpsed hurrying
toward the dock from wherever she’d been malingering with a cigarette
and a Photoplay the contemptible, the incompetent swimming instruc-
tor, her face a shocked mask of disbelief. Pete reached across her and
pulled shut the flimsy door. He kicked up the engine, a heart-seizing
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 343
noise, a noise that was not only loud but also large, as though it pro-
duced the whole scale of possible sounds from the lowest to the highest
and erased every other sound there could be. From then on it was the
strongest, most easeful sound Martha Goldensohn knew.
It wasn’t until she was in college that she began taking flying lessons.
That would have been early 1941, and already the Air Corps was being
withdrawn from the routine jobs and organized into a fighting force,
and there was a need for fliers and planes who could take urgent mes-
sages or deliver those serums or search for lost hikers. She’d go down
in her little Austin runabout to the flying field whenever she could, and
pay for lessons at twelve dollars an hour, outrageous, nothing else at
school cost anything like that.
“Amelia Earhart, huh,” the instructor, whose name was Doc of
course, remarked when she signed up.
“Ha ha,” she said. “Anytime a woman says, I’d like to fly, you have
to say ‘Amelia Earhart’ right after, or you have bad luck all day—that
it?”
She did well, she had a gift, though she almost flunked out of col-
lege, which Daddy would not have been happy about, spending all her
time on the field or in the air. She managed mostly Cs that semester;
what mattered to her was that she got her pilot’s license. She took a
little inheritance she got that year to go in with a couple of men around
the field on a six-year-old Cessna Airmaster that had been rebuilt after
a tipover on landing. She convinced her partners to sign up with her for
the brand-new Civil Air Patrol. Ten days later the Japanese bombed
Pearl Harbor.
Martha had felt since her first flight that if you’d once flown a plane
you’d never go to war, never want to, never see the point. Not only
because all those borders and their checkpoints and barricades would
be invisible or imaginary looked down on from above but also because
flight itself was better than fighting. She knew well enough that war
delighted men who could fly. She knew about the fleets of bombers over
London, so merciless; the Stukas that strafed the retreating British at
Dunkirk, the planes that shot up the lifeboats of sinking enemy ships:
you could think by 1942 that flying itself arose from an evil impulse
344 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
and ought to be banned. But she loved it, and her love, like any love,
seemed to her innocent. She couldn’t argue it and wasn’t going to try.
The great thing about the CAP was that you got all the fuel you
could use, though sometimes the supply itself was low. After all she
and her fellow CAP pilots were helping to protect the nation. She never
herself got to go out on coastal patrol and hunt for German subs (or
sink one, as one heroic or lucky CAP pilot had done), but still she was
showing what women could do in the war effort, and also, by the way,
what Jewish people (as her mother always named them) could do, take
that, Hitler, and all of them.
Silly, and she didn’t need an excuse, but she took the ones she was
offered. She flew packages and medical goods and government docu-
ments and ferried officials and searched for lost hikers all that summer,
and then in the fall, she got a telegram: it was one sent to every quali-
fied woman pilot that could be identified, and it invited her to become
a pilot with the Women’s Air Ferry Service.
Yes she’d go. She could go back and finish college when this was
over. If she washed out, well, she’d go back to the CAP program, or go
rivet things or weld things. She wasn’t going to go read Shakespeare
and Milton now, no, Daddy, not now. She convinced him and he con-
vinced Mother, or Mother at least in the end didn’t say no.
The week before she was to take the train south (she’d wanted to
drive the Austin down but Daddy nixed that and got her a roomette)
she stayed home every night and had dinner with her parents and her
brother and her grandmother, helped her mother paste photographs in
a family album and label the black pages with white ink, such beauti-
ful handwriting she had, and she had lunch in the city with her father
and drank a Manhattan and let him take her shopping to buy simple
strong outfits they imagined would be suitable for her training (she’d
send them home when eventually uniforms were issued them—she
lived in those and her rumpled fatigues and a couple of skirts and
blouses).
Her last evening before heading south she spent with her brother
Norman, playing cribbage and joshing and drinking a cocktail Norman
had invented that was so nasty you couldn’t have more than one, it was
more a joke than an intoxicant. Norman rolled up to the little bar in
the library and pretended to know exactly what he was doing.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 345
“Creme de menthe,” he said, flourishing the Mae West–shaped
bottle. “White of egg. Muddle the lemon with sugar.”
“Oh stop, Norman.”
“You’ll love it.”
He turned the chair to face her, with the huge murky drink in hand.
“To you,” he said. She took it from him and picked up his too; he
needed both hands to move the chair through the room and down the
little ramp that led to what Daddy called the card room. He locked the
brake and with her help went from the wheelchair to an easy chair he
liked, in which he usually spent much of his day.
“I like the mustache,” she said. “It’s so handsome.”
Norman was an inordinately good-looking man, Martha thought,
and everyone else did too, and a vestigial vanity about it had continued
even after the polio, when (Norman said) good looks were about as
much use to him as another ear. His thick black hair fell over his brow
> like Gable’s, and the new mustache was like his too.
“You’ll write,” he said.
“Of course.”
“Long letters. Every day.”
“I might be a little busy.”
She didn’t mind the job of writing her life for Norman. Even when
there wasn’t much life. In fact it was easier when there wasn’t much to
say. Setting out on an adventure, in aid of the nation, to fly planes in
the company of other women with nerve and skill: that was going to be
harder, she could see that already, but she’d do it, she’d brag, she’d tell
all, and not a touch of sorrow for him, not a touch of it. That was the
agreement, never spoken. She could feel condemned down deep inside
her that she could fly when he couldn’t walk, she could feel that it was
wrong in her to feel joy in any movement or possibility whatever when
she sat with him here: but she knew also never, ever to show it.
“So any news?” she asked.
“No news, Martha.” He smiled the smile that always came with
that answer, and sipped his concoction. “Oh. This.”
He put down his drink and made his way back into the wheelchair
and across the rug to a table by the window flanked with shelves and
drawers where his coin collection was housed. There were more albums
in his rooms upstairs, but the trip upward in the clanking lift was one
346 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
he took as infrequently as he could. He’d told Martha that making all
that noise was as embarrassing as loudly passing wind in public.
“Here,” he said. He took, from a stiff envelope addressed to him
and sent from Mexico City, a small envelope of glassine. From that he
removed and dropped into her hand a heavy coin of gray silver.
“Just arrived,” Norman said. He often showed her his new acquisi-
tions—reading history and novels and this collection were what he
did—but this coin seemed to evoke not the usual enthusiasm but a kind
of melancholy in him. He let her finger it for a moment and then took
it back, to tell her (as he always did) its story.
“A Spanish milled dollar,” he said, “1733, see? Reign of Philip the
Fifth. That’s the arms of Spain. This is a nice piece, and maybe was
never circulated. Look on the obverse.”
The other side of the coin said Vtraque Vnum and showed a pair
of pillars with a scroll between them. Martha tried to remember her
