by John Crowley
enough.
He ordered a Cuba libre. Soon the band stopped playing and the
singer softly and sincerely said good night.
Late December 1944 and there are fifty B-30s on the tarmac at Ponca
City, unable to be flown out until whatever’s wrong with their engine
cowlings or their oil tanks or ignition processes is discovered and fixed.
We couldn’t stop making them, for what would be done with us and all
our skills and training, all our tools and procedures, then? So—a little
more slowly, a little more thoroughly—we went on making them, the
Teenie Weenies doing more standing around than before (as the Teenie
Weenies in the comic pages are all doing most of the time while the
active ones explore or labor). And then one more is drawn out the great
doors to join the flock of others pointed toward the West and the enemy
but going nowhere. When the doors open the icy fog rolls in and rises
to the height of the ceiling above, to linger there like a lost black
cloud.
How cold and dark that winter of ’44–’45 was. In the North it was
the bitterest in years; the lack of fuel oil was life threatening in some
places, places far from Ponca City, we heard it on the radio, eyewit-
ness. It seemed harder because for a while it looked like the war in
Europe at least was almost over. War production was cut back and
some items unseen since before the war began to return to the stores—
irons, pots and pans, stoves, refrigerators. Then came the huge
Ardennes counteroffensive and the Battle of the Bulge and the mad
resistance in the Pacific at every atoll and beach, and the planners
thought again. Some controls on metals and other things were reim-
posed; new ration books were issued, and not only that: all your
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 355
unspent ration points from ’44 were invalidated. Everybody started
1945 with a new damn book, same old rules to follow, now maybe
forever: that winter suspicion that the sun’s not ever going to return.
Except now people didn’t feel so ready to sacrifice, we were tired of all
that, so tired, and so back came Mr. Black in a big way, the stuff you
wanted was there if you could find it, gas traded for whatever you had,
farm-butchered beef and pork removed from the system and sold out of
meat lockers that you knew about if you knew.
Those who are going into the services now, boys out of high school,
the rejects of the factories, the once but no longer deferred, know they
will be the last: the boys mostly eager for the chance, desperate to grow
old enough in time, others perhaps feeling differently. Now the lives of
men killed and wounded far away seem to have been wasted, a loss
insupportable, and more are dying now than in the frenzy of begin-
ning—in the climb up useless Italy, in the frozen mud of the Ardennes,
in the assaults on palm tree islands in nowhere, for nothing. It’s begin-
ning to be possible to think so, though you’d never say it. For the first
time, photographs of the prostrate bodies of our men are shown to us,
on beaches, in the snow: the dead in Life. Why now? Is it a warning, a
judgment, a caution—you see this now but you will see far worse if you
slacken? We don’t know.
At Van Damme Aero Ponca City a woman walks down the long
nave of the Assembly Building with a steady tread, eyes looking neither
left nor right. It’s Mona the mail girl, with a telegram. The edge of the
yellow form can be seen in the front pouch of her bag. A mail girl’s
never seen on the floor if she’s not bringing one, she never brings just
mail, you get that at home or at the post office, they bring mail to the
offices of the managers and bosses but not to Associates out on the
floor. Of all the mail girls in their night blue uniforms it’s Mona who is
always chosen to deliver the telegram: tall and phlegmatic, vast black
pelt of hair over her brow and shoulders, black brows knitted together
in the middle over the prow of her nose—those who watch her pass
know these details, there have been opportunities to study her. When
she comes through the floor, her long slow steps, a zone of silence
moves with her, leaving a stillness in its wake even if those behind take
up their work again, spared this time; and the silence moves on ahead,
and spreads around her when she stops.
356 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Mrs. Bunce Wrobleski?” Mona asks, drawing out the telegram.
They know; they stop working but they don’t—most don’t, out of pity
or to honor her privacy—look at Connie taking the flimsy form from
Mona; Mona because she can do this task without weeping herself,
can stand dark and silent there long enough for respect but not too
long.
MRS BUNCE WROBLESKI
VAN DAMME AERO PONCA CITY OKLA=
THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP
REGRET THAT YOUR HUSBAND CPL BUNCE J WROBLESKI WAS
KILLED IN ACTION 05 JAN 1945 LETTER FOLLOWS=
JA WILLIAM THE ADJUTANT GENERAL
Once General Marshall wrote these letters in his own hand. Now
there are too many, too many even to count yet. Nor can the silence of
that moment last a long time. The women around Connie (the men
won’t come forward or can’t or don’t know how) shelter her, and help
her to her feet from where she has sat helplessly down; and they hold
her one by one and help her off the floor even when she says No, no, let
me go, let me just go on, there’s so much, so much to do.
After a time we do start up again, and the silence disperses.
7
Connie went back north with Andy to bring him to see his grand-
parents, to leave him there for a while so they could have him
with them; after a while she could come back, go on working.
She’d got a letter telling her how to collect on Bunce’s standard
government insurance policy, he must have told her he had one but she
didn’t remember him doing so and she’d stared down at the letter and
the huge amount of money feeling sick and horrified, as at some loath-
some joke. She’d already been informed that Bunce wouldn’t be brought
home, not now, that there were just too many to bring home; he’d be
buried with the thousands there in the land he’d died in, it hurt her
heart to think of it, and to think what Buster and his mom must feel.
She had to go back, for them. So she wrapped her son in the warm
winter clothes he’d worn when they left the North, and they boarded
the train, the same train.
“Good-bye, Prosper.”
“Good-bye, Connie.”
“I’ll see you again soon.”
“Sure. I’ll be seeing you.”
“Are you all right? What is it?”
“Yes sure. Just my back.”
358 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Your back hurts?”
“My back hurts some all the time, Connie. Almost all the time.”
“You never said.”
“No reason to say. Get on board, Connie.”
“God bless you, Prosper.”
Going through the prairie and the river valleys Connie seemed to
see
all that she couldn’t see when she had come the other way: the
shabby towns and the weary old cars, the streets without people,
unpainted storefronts, peeling billboards advertising things that no
one could get or weren’t for sale. All the hurt done to this country in
the last ten years and more, the things not repaired or replaced, still
left undone because the war came first. The light-less factories too,
fences rusting, gates closed with chains. Rollo had told her that thou-
sands of businesses had failed since the war buildup began, little shops
and bigger places too that couldn’t compete with the great names for
the government contracts. Consolidation. More had failed than in the
Depression.
Gold star in a window there.
Maybe she could see it all because of where she had been for months,
that place all new and furiously busy. One of those that would come
out rich.
Night and the train filling at small stations with soldiers, different
somehow now from the crowds of them that had played cards and
teased her on the way down. Different in her eyes. Outside, the land so
dark, new regulations, all places of amusement had to close at mid-
night: no neon lights or floodlights to save power and fuel.
Dark, rich. She tried to remember what god it was in ancient times
who ruled over the land below the earth, which was always dark but
rich, because he was also the god of money, of gold dug in the dark
earth. Pluto. Plutocracy, a vocabulary word. Did she travel home
through Pluto’s realm, money given and made, the great owners get-
ting richer nightlong and every one else getting a little richer too,
hoarding their money like misers and waiting? And the dead souls
without rest among us, so many. Around her the standing men in
their drab uniforms swayed with the train’s motion like wheat, so
quiet in the dark. Some of them, she hoped, some at least were going
home.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 359
That spring we watched in the newsreels the gleaming B-29 Superfor-
tresses, long and slim and impossibly wide-winged like the Pax but
coming smartly off the assembly lines of four different factories in
working order and already winging over the Pacific. They could reach
Tokyo now, as the B-30 was intended to do from bases in China; but
those bases had never materialized, and the B-29s took off from the
little islands of the Pacific, Saipan, Tinian. In March they were sent in
a great fleet in the night to fly in low and drop not great blockbuster
bombs but hundreds of thousands of little canisters of jellied gasoline.
Tokyo they always said was a Paper City. Before the war, girls collected
Japanese dolls with paper fans and paper umbrellas and paper chrysan-
themums for their hair; the dolls were accompanied by little books
about Japan and the paper houses and cities. In the newsreels we’d seen
the jellied gasoline tested, an instant spread of white fire and black
smoke, each canister making a disaster. The crowded city burned so
hotly that the Superfortresses were tossed high up into the air above it
by the rising heat, like ash above a bonfire. Later in the newsreels
Tokyo was a gray checkerboard of streets, nothing more; no buildings,
no people.
In April in Oklahoma, the lilacs purple and white bloomed along
the little river where Prosper and Diane had watched the lights of the
refinery in Pancho’s Zephyr. In the middle of the first shift at the plant
the loudspeaker announcer, whose inadequate and uncertain voice
we’d all come to love and mock, came on unexpectedly.
“Attention attention. In a few moments the president of Van Damme
Aero, Mr. Henry Van Damme, will be speaking to you, bringing you
an important announcement. At this time please shut down machines
and tools in Bulletin A5 sequence. Crane operators please secure lifted
parts.”
Silence, or at least quiet, passed over the buildings, the whine of
machines going down, the ceaseless clangor ceasing.
“Mr. Van Damme will speak to you now.”
There was a moment of silence, a slight rustle of papers, and Henry
Van Damme began to speak, his voice oddly high and light, at least
over this system. Most of us had never heard it before.
360 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Ladies and gentlemen, Van Damme Aero Associates. My office
received a cable two hours ago announcing that President Franklin
Roosevelt died suddenly last night.”
Of course he couldn’t hear us where he was, but he was wise enough
to know he must pause then and wait. There was a noise of dropped
tools, a woman’s piercing cry, and a mist of expelled sound. There was
weeping. A voice here and there raised in blessing or hopeless denial or
distress.
“I knew Franklin Roosevelt,” Henry said, and his light voice grew
lighter. “I know that he would want us not to mourn but to look for-
ward. The work is not done. And yet.” Here came the sound of more
papers shuffled, or perhaps a handkerchief used, and then Henry Van
Damme began speaking again in a different voice, it was hard to say
different in what way, but we lifted our heads.
“Oh captain my captain,” he said. Then for a moment he didn’t go
on. “Oh captain my captain, our fearful trip is done. The ship has
weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won.”
Of course we knew the words, many of us, most of us. It was a verse
we had by heart, one we’d spoken on Oration Day or standing at our
desks while teachers tapped the rhythms. Oh heart heart heart. A few
people spoke softly along with Henry Van Damme, as though it were a
prayer.
“The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and
done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.”
The strange thing is that all through that April night there were
rumors across the country of the deaths of other men, names we all
knew, all of them found to be alive the next day. There was a closed
sign on Jack Dempsey’s restaurant in New York City: surely Dempsey
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 361
was dead. Jack Benny had died suddenly. Almost a thousand calls came
into the New York Times asking about the stories. Babe Ruth was
dead. Charlie Chaplin. Frank Sinatra. The rumors fled as fast as long-
distance calls across the country. As though we thought our king and
pharaoh, gone to the other side, needed a phalanx of great ones to con-
duct him on his way.
Henry Van Damme flew back that day to the Coast to talk with his
brother and the relevant officers of Van Damme Aero about reducing
costs on the Pax program as well as larger plans for the postwar world.
As of that moment no industry fulfilling war contracts was permitted
to begin conversion to peacetime production, since that would give an
unfair advantage over others in similar case, but it had to be antici-
/>
pated; they were all like yachts backing and tacking at the start line,
eager to go. This miraculous over-the-rainbow collaboration between
the military and industry was about to end—why would it continue?—
and first across the line would be first into the new world. Competition
though wasn’t what it had been prewar, as we were already learning to
say. It seemed more and more likely that Van Damme Aero itself would
undergo dissolution into one of the even huger consolidated aircraft
firms now in the process of forming like thunderheads out of rising
plumes of heated air. Whether Henry and Julius would come out atop
whatever entity would be born from that, or would remain somehow
within the shell of the older company to fill out their days, was not at
all clear. Henry Van Damme was so tired and sick at heart now that he
began to believe he didn’t care.
“It’s necessary to begin now to reduce the workforce on the pro-
gram, in fact throughout all the programs, including the A-21 and
others that are still fulfilling orders, so that we don’t release a tide of
unemployed just as war work ends and peacetime retooling hasn’t
begun.” That was the VP for labor, whose resemblance to the common
figure of Death and Taxes with scythe and dark cowl had just become
apparent to Henry. “The goal is to retain the skilled workforce. Unions
are helping here; the Management-Labor Policy Committee we’ve had
to set up has done a fine job of getting cooperation on all kinds of labor
issues, the turnovers, the absenteeism, reconversion issues. So far.
Unions will be willing to let go last-hired men, men with poor records,
older men new to the union, and particularly women. Well they only
362 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
ever admitted as many women as they had to anyway, and those few’ve
got little seniority. Of course the women will largely want to quit as
soon as peace comes, maybe before, not just because they’ll be glad to
get back to the home but because they’ll see that their husbands and all
the other young men being demobilized will need those jobs.”
He turned a leaf of his report—that item dealt with—on to the next.
“The handicaps will want to go home too, where they can be taken
care of. They made a fine effort, many of them, but the limited tasks
they were able to do can be redistributed now. It looks pretty certain
