Four Freedoms

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

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  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

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  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?”

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  “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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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