by John Crowley
Latin. “And both one?”
Norman nodded, not bad. “Actually ‘the one and the other.’ Mean-
ing the two worlds, East and West, Spain and the New World. But look
closer at the pillars. Here.” He picked up a Sherlock Holmes–style
magnifying glass from the table and gave it to her. “Look at the little
scroll. Can you read that?”
“No.”
“It says Plus ultra, ” Norman said. He lifted his head, tossed back
that falling lock of shining hair. “It means Even farther. Even farther,
Sis.” He put the cold coin back into her hand and closed her fingers
over it. “Keep it with you,” he said. “Go even farther. Just write.”
She wrote: she didn’t write that her first training base had no fire equip-
ment, that they’d had no insurance, no hospital anywhere nearby, and
they’d gone up in whatever planes were available and not always
brought them down in one piece, partly because the mechanics dis-
liked the idea of women flying their planes and pushed the checkout
jobs onto the least senior men. She didn’t say that, because he’d tell
Mother and Mother didn’t need to be more alarmed than she already
was or more certain that Martha should come back home and go work
with the USO. She wrote him funny stories and amazing stories and
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 347
stories that were both, about being sent down to the Great Dismal
Swamp, yes that’s its name, to learn how to pull targets for antiaircraft
gunners to train on, gunners who missed and hit the tow planes every
now and then. She told him about the male pilot who was assigned to
fly with a woman pilot and stormed in to his commander and said he
was quitting if he had to fly with women, and tore off his wings and
threw them down on the commander’s desk; the commander said I’ll
tell you when you’re quitting, pick up those wings and report for duty.
So maybe that story wasn’t true, anyway Martha didn’t know it was
true and the one or two male commanding officers she’d had anything
to do with were as patronizing and horrid as any pilot, but it was the
right story anyway. She told Norman how you used “Code X” on your
orders to mean you couldn’t fly because you had your monthlies, or “a
limited physical disability” as they said. She quoted him the silly songs
they sang: The moral of this story, girls, as you can plainly see, Is
never trust a pilot an inch above your knee— but she didn’t tell him
when she lost her virginity.
She told him about flying: how at first she felt like she’d never
learned to fly at all, the planes she was training in landed at nearly a
hundred miles an hour, which was faster than any cruising speed she’d
ever maintained. In a dive you could black out and blood would pour
out of your nose. Her old Cessna had put out about 70 horsepower,
and these things had two fierce engines that could get up to 1500 horse-
power, there’s the difference right there; they had retractable landing
gear to remember to retract, constant-speed propellers, a hundred
things to remember that she’d never encountered before.
She didn’t tell him about the women she’d heard of who’d lost con-
trol of a plane, or whose plane had failed them, who’d died in a crash.
Boredom and inaction were almost as large a part of it as danger,
though: sitting around the duty room gossiping and “hangar flying” as
they said, telling stories of this or that flight or near miss or cool bravery;
riding the milk train or, worse, the bus back from ferrying a plane; doing
paperwork; waiting; more waiting. Angling for the better jobs, for more
flying, fewer ground lessons, watching other women get ahead. There
was no way not to see that the WAFS, which became the WASP, was in
some ways a lot like college, like sorority, like school, like, yes, camp.
There was always a core group who never got in trouble for things that
348 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
others had to pay for, whose records stayed spotless when others were
washed out for minor infractions. They were the ones who shared a way
of talking, a line of jokes, a kind of insouciance, the ones that male com-
manders thought of as their sort of woman. Many of them had got their
licenses and their hours because they’d been able to fly their own planes,
had families that could afford them, and been able to spend summers
racing or barnstorming. She’d known such girls all her life, she was one
of them herself at the same time as she could never be one of them, she
didn’t give a damn about that, but she didn’t like getting sidelined or
blackballed either, for the one reason no one would say: and fortunately,
in this world and this time, what mattered most was how good you were,
farm girl, working girl, college girl, Jewish girl. She was good. She loved
the flying, loved learning she could fly huge bombers with as much ease
and certainty as she’d flown her old Cessna. And she came to love her
sisters. In spite of it all. Most of them.
“So now can I ask you a question?” Martha said to Prosper in the Dining
Commons in Henryville. Her comrades had departed for bed or the
Bomb Bay, and he’d told her his story and made his pitch, and she’d not
said yes or no, though No was obviously the right answer.
“Sure,” Prosper said. “Certainly.”
“Is that polio you have?”
“No,” Prosper said. “Something different.”
“Oh.” She looked around them, not as though she was about to tell
a secret, and yet for a reason, he thought. “My older brother,” she said,
“has polio.”
“Oh? Right now?”
“Well I mean he had it once. He’s. Well he has a wheelchair.”
“Oh.”
“He’s at home.”
“Uh-huh.”
He waited, ready to answer from his store of information and expe-
rience any question she might like to put to him; not many people
needed it.
“So where’ll you go when this is over?” Martha asked at length,
seeming to change the subject. “Home?”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 349
“Oh I don’t know.” He opened his arms. “Maybe see the world.”
She took that for a joke, or at least a whimsy, and in fact he some-
what drooped just after saying it. “You liked working here?” she said.
“It’s been pretty wonderful. Actually.”
“Because you got to do your part.”
“Because there’s no stairs.”
Martha studied him in puzzlement for a moment, then laughed.
“All right. I understand.”
“Is your brother working?”
“Him? Oh no. No, he had planned to go to law school, but then.”
Prosper nodded, nodded again, acknowledging. “Lots of stairs at
law school,” he said, “I’d imagine.”
Martha laughed again, a better outcome than he’d hoped for.
“Maybe if there weren’t,” he said, “I’d go be a lawyer.”
“Okay,” she said. “All right.”
He drew out his cigarettes, and shook one forth for her to take if
she liked, but she waved it away. “So Martha
,” he said. “About this
request. This, this appeal. What do you think?”
“Well why do you want to do this for her? I don’t get it.”
“She’s. I mean she’s just.”
“I’m sorry,” Martha said, “but I get the feeling there’s something
about this you aren’t telling me.”
“It’s just important,” Prosper said helplessly.
“You tell me why it is,” Martha said. “Why it’s important to you,
and why you’re here asking and she’s not, and maybe I’ll give you an
answer.”
He told her the story, Diane’s, and told her his part in it too. It took
a while. She listened. At the end she was leaning forward on her crossed
arms, all ears.
“Well. Gee. I wouldn’t have thought.”
“Why? You mean a guy like me?”
She shrugged, smiling. “It’s natural to think.”
“Is it?”
“You’re blushing,” she said.
“Wouldn’t you say, though,” Prosper said, moving the ashtray
around as though it were a fixed opinion he wanted to loosen, “that
people are all the time thinking that only certain kinds of people can
350 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
do certain kinds of things? And you can’t change their opinion even if
you know better? Even if, for you, doing that thing, that thing you do,
doesn’t seem so unlikely to you, if it seems to you the most natural
thing in the world?”
She was blushing now herself.
“I just mean,” he said. And he gestured to her. “You flying. The big
bombers. Tell me the men all thought you could do it, oh no problem
there. Tell me the other girls thought so. Tell me your mom thought
so.”
For a long time she looked at him, as though she was putting
together from all over her life the parts of a thought she’d never thought
before. Then she said: “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay I’ll take her.”
“Now you won’t tell her I told you all that.”
“No. Get her there at 0445 hours. That’s quarter to five, a.m. No
later or I’ll leave without her. One little bag, no more. She should dress
warm. Tell her if she pukes on me I’ll push her out the door.”
“I’ll tell her that.”
“Don’t you dare.”
They shook hands but then still sat for a while. Martha said she’d
probably be back this way soon, with another crew. Maybe they could
talk some more, she said, and Prosper Olander said oh sure, he’d defi-
nitely be here, he hoped they could meet, yes, he’d like that very much,
to meet and talk: he would.
6
You remember my friend Poindexter,” Danny said. “Bill.”
“Of course I remember him. I’m not going to forget that.”
They lay naked in the center of a bed big enough for three,
faint light of a single lamp in a far corner, the room was as vast
as a palace. Top o’ the Mark. This was the room that Danny had been
given, a suite actually, his buddies coming and going all day but all
gone now, leaving it to Danny and Diane. She’d not told him how she’d
got there, she’d put it a day back, a long train ride, not so bad though
she said, not bad at all, because it brought her here to him. Actually she
felt like she’d been carried here on a witch’s broomstick, it was the
most dreadful and terrifying thing she’d ever done, ever even imagined
doing, which she actually couldn’t have in advance. And that woman
Martha just grinning at her and making small talk and pointing out
the pretty lights below whenever Diane beside her could open her
eyes.
“He got hurt pretty bad,” Danny said. In this dimness his face was
hollowed and skull-like, the sockets of his eyes deep and his cheeks
sunken, as though he’d seen things that wouldn’t pass from him, as
though he went on seeing them always. “We had to land on the deck in
the dark. We’d just made it back from hunting the Jap carrier and it
was night. Lot of guys didn’t get back. Almost out of gas, you had to
352 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
set it down first try, couldn’t go around again and again. They’d lit up
the ship with every light they had, but it was still like landing on a
nighttime parking lot in the middle of a city. That’s when I got banged
up. Danny almost made it, but his tailhook missed the cable and he
went into the crash barrier and over the side. His plane broke up when
it went into the water. They got him out, but he’d crushed his left side.
He’ll live, but he’s lost an arm and a leg.”
“Oh Danny.” He’d said it all as though he were writing it in a letter,
or reading it from one: as though it were far away from himself, some-
thing heard of or remembered from long ago.
“Yeah well. He’s up and around, sort of. Sylvia’s leaving him,
though.”
“No.”
“Well.” He moved his dark body in the silky sheets. He’d lost
weight; his white north-land face was as dark as hers. “You can under-
stand, I guess. I mean he was—well he’s half a man. How was he gonna
keep her.”
“Oh Danny.”
“I don’t think I could do it,” Danny said. “He was damn damn
brave. Said he just wanted to live. I don’t think I could do that, live
with that.”
“Oh Danny no.” She covered her mouth, and her breasts.
“Don’t think about it,” Danny said and moved to hold her again.
She’d been afraid up to the last minute that he might be so war weary
or war torn or hurt that he wouldn’t be able to or want to, and then
where’d she be? But it was the reverse, he wouldn’t stop, clung to her
and pressed himself to her as though he could just disappear right
inside her and forget everything. She’d asked Prosper—asked him once
and then again, last thing before she’d climbed aboard that horrid
plane—if there was a chance that the baby she carried could turn out,
well, like him, Prosper. Whether the baby might have, you know, that.
No no, Prosper’d told her, no, no chance, that was an operation he’d
had that went wrong, not something in the blood you could inherit.
The same answer twice. But just now she thought of what she hadn’t
asked: what had that operation been for? What was it supposed to fix,
that it didn’t fix?
“Oh Danny,” she said, and said again, weeping even as she held
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 353
him, all she could say to mean so many things she couldn’t or didn’t
know how to say, the name of every grief endured or escaped, every
misunderstood grace, every utter loss, every hope, every new fear, each
one remembered as they embraced, felt as though for the first or the
last time.
Prosper got a letter from her a week later. She told him she guessed
the plan had worked. She’d decided to stay out there, she said, go home
again to her parents, just rest and take it easy and eat good food and be
careful for the baby until it was born. She’d write to her roommate, she
said, and get her clothes and things sent home, there wasn’t much
&
nbsp; really, the way they all lived out there; the dungarees and gloves and
things could just be thrown out. She’d begun then to write something
more and crossed it out so hard he couldn’t even guess at the meaning,
or why she’d crossed it out: something she thought would hurt him to
read, or something she’d decided he shouldn’t know; something she
didn’t want to promise, or offer; something.
In the Bomb Bay a new band was playing, an all-girl one this time,
the Honeydrops. Their weary bus was outside, and their ruffled gowns
looked weary too, but they themselves weren’t, few as they were they
beat up a big sound; their singer wailing high above the horns and
clarinets, looking right at Prosper, as though the song she sang asked
him and him alone a question: maybe the other men there felt the same
but he was the only one who just sat and listened. Prosper was hearing
one of the songs she sang for the first time. She sang it holding the
microphone stand with tenderness and putting her lips almost to the
bulbous mike itself to croon, he’d never seen that before. She’d kiss him
once, she sang; she’d kiss him twice, and once again; it’d been a long,
long time.
In the coming year, when Bing sang this song, and the boys were
returning from Europe and then from the Pacific, it would be about
how hard it had been for them over there, about coming home at last to
wives and girlfriends. We’d hear it constantly; we can still hear it. But
when Prosper heard it sung there in the Bomb Bay well before it was a
hit, and with Diane’s letter in his pocket, it seemed to be not about men
but women. It seemed to be what those women, those hundreds of
thousands left behind here, might say to someone they might meet,
someone like himself: that they had waited a long long time, and were
354 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
going to get a kiss and more than a kiss now where and when they
could, until that man did come home, and everything would be differ-
ent: but this was now and not then. Which in a way seemed to him
dreadfully and wholly sad, even though he supposed he had been a
beneficiary of that situation, and perhaps even had done some women
some good that they wouldn’t have got otherwise, which was somehow
sad too. In fact he couldn’t decide which was sadder, and tried not to
ponder it too much. He guessed that there would be time for that soon
