Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  have one stamp left, and no more till next month.”

  “What kind of ration card do you have?” Prosper asked.

  The fellow looked up at him as though surprised, maybe, that some-

  one like him would know to ask this question, which could hardly be

  of much interest to him. “The miserable A,” he said. “My employer

  was unable even to get me a B. He was told salesmen could take the

  train. I think not.”

  Prosper said nothing. A salesman.

  “And yourself?” the man said. “Alone and palely loitering?”

  Not knowing why he should do so, Prosper decided not to pass this

  by. “I was going to take the El downtown,” he said. “But those stairs

  are a little beyond me.”

  The man looked at the stairs, the iron framework of the El, as

  though seeing them for the first time. “Inconvenient,” he said. He indi-

  cated the knapsack. “You are prepared for a journey.”

  “I was going west to look for work.”

  The salesman didn’t look surprised or amused by this ambition,

  though Prosper’d expected the one or the other. “So a ride downtown

  wouldn’t take you far. I see that now.”

  “And there’d go your gas, though I appreciate the offer.”

  For a moment they stood together, Prosper and the salesman, both

  feeling (they’d confess it later to each other) that there was another

  remark to make, that Destiny had put them in speaking relation and

  they hadn’t yet said the thing Destiny wanted them to say.

  “The name’s Notzing,” said the salesman then, and put out his

  hand—a little tentatively, thinking perhaps that such a one as Prosper

  might not take hands, or not be able to—Prosper saw those thoughts

  also, also not unfamiliar to him. “Call me Pancho.” The way he said it,

  the first syllable sounded like ranch and not like launch.

  42 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  “Prosper Olander,” Prosper returned, and took the salesman’s hand

  before it retreated. Then he took from inside his coat a small paper

  booklet. “This might help you out,” he said.

  Pancho Notzing reached for the thing, a look of baffled wonder-

  ment beginning to break on his face that he struggled to conceal. The

  booklet was a C gasoline ration booklet, the most generous ranking,

  reserved for doctors, ministers, railroad workers, people on whom we

  all depended (that anyway was the idea). It was chock-full of coupons.

  It was unsigned.

  “A man could go far on this,” he said.

  Prosper said nothing.

  “I wonder how you came by it,” he said. “Issued to you perhaps in

  error?”

  “Not exactly.” The book remained in Pancho’s hand, as though still

  in passage between them. “Where were you driving to, anyway?”

  “I don’t really have a destination. I have my route, of course, and my

  territory. But to tell you the truth I have been thinking of quitting.”

  “Really.”

  “I don’t suppose you’re offering those to me for sale.”

  “That would be a crime,” Prosper said.

  For a moment neither of them said anything more, the conclusion

  evident to each of them already, only the question of who was to broach

  it remaining. Barter was a thing we all in those times resorted to; Mr.

  Black was a man we knew.

  “I have been to the West,” Pancho said then. “The Mission country.

  The land of Ramona. The hacienda at sunset. The primrose blooming

  in the desert.”

  “There’s a windshield sticker that goes with it,” Prosper said, reach-

  ing again into his pocket. “I have that too.”

  “I understand all the big plants are hiring. Everyone can do his

  part.”

  “They say.”

  Pancho straightened, and with a final glance at the C booklet, he

  put it in the breast pocket of his jacket. “You shouldn’t be made to

  suffer indignities, if you’re headed out to help build ships or airplanes.

  Ride with me, and we’ll make our way. I’m in the way of changing jobs

  myself.”

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 43

  “You don’t say.”

  So sporting the new C sticker on the windshield, the Zephyr set off

  in the direction of the sunset; when it ran out of gas just yards from

  the next pump, Prosper took the wheel as the old man pushed, and

  together they rolled it to the pump, Prosper pulling up gently on the

  hand brake lever as instructed to bring it to a stop. The attendant, a

  plump young woman in a billed cap and leather bow tie—there were

  lots of women manning the pumps now, with the male pump jockeys

  off at war—watched as Prosper pulled his crutches from the back seat

  and got out to stand next to Pancho, who was panting with effort and

  pressing a hand to his breast. They presented their C booklet, which

  Pancho had signed, and the girl tore out a stamp, then expertly unlim-

  bered the hose and wound the handle of the counter to put in their

  allotted gas. No one spoke. The pump bell rang off the gallons. Above

  them the red Flying Horse beat skyward. When she was done she

  cheerfully washed the windshield with a sponge, her rump in the trou-

  sers of her brown coverall moving with her motions. She took Pros-

  per’s money and went to make change while the two men stood not

  speaking by the car.

  “All set,” she said, returning with the change.

  “Thanks,” said Prosper.

  “Thanks,” said Pancho.

  “Oil change?” she asked. “Check those belts?”

  “No, no thanks.”

  The car started with a cough, dry throat needing a moment to

  recover.

  “Bye,” said the girl, and gave them a smart two-finger salute. “Drive

  under thirty-five.”

  “Bye,” said Prosper.

  “Bye,” said Pancho.

  The two of them didn’t speak again for some time after that, con-

  scious of having done a wrong, not quite knowing whether to con-

  gratulate themselves or shake their heads over the ways of the world

  that had forced them to it, or just shut up; Pancho never would ask

  Prosper, in all their journey together, where he had come up with those

  stamps, and Prosper didn’t volunteer the information.

  Pancho had a couple of last calls to make, he’d told Prosper, and

  44 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  then a stop at the home office in the next city, where he’d leave his

  sample cases, his last orders, and his resignation. He roomed with his

  widowed sister, he said, when not on the road, which he was most of

  the time; he’d wire her about his plans. Then they’d head for the south

  and then the Coast.

  “What was it you sell, or sold I guess?” said Prosper when the Mobil

  station was far behind them and his city growing thin and passing

  too.

  “Fabrics,” Pancho said. “Commercial mostly. To the trade. Dam-

  asks, matelassés, shantungs, broadcloths, velours. Specialty silks.

  Done it for thirty years, a traveler in fabrics.”

  “Why don’t you want to do it anymore?”

  For a time Pancho seemed to be choosing among various answers

  he might give, opening his mout
h and making introductory sounds,

  then shutting it again. “Ah, for one thing,” he said, “the business is

  changing. I’m getting too old to keep up. All these new man-made

  wonder fabrics. Nylon, rayon, spray-on, pee-on, who the hell can keep

  them straight or pitch them in any way that’d be useful, well whoever

  can, I can’t. Then this war, the big companies supplying the war depart-

  ment are taking all the business, sucking up all the supplies, the cotton,

  the silk, all of it, if you’re not selling to the government forget it.

  Rationing: how are you going to sell fine fabrics to manufacturers who

  are cutting back every day? When the women are wearing unlined suits

  and the men are leaving the pocket flaps off their jackets and the cuffs

  off their trousers? You tell me.”

  Prosper could not tell him.

  “More than that and above it all,” Pancho said, “I violate my own

  best sense of how a man should live. I have done the same work for

  decades, never changing, never learning, without friends beside me,

  without associates, without the refreshment of change, without

  delight.” He turned to Prosper. “Not that this makes me in any way

  different from millions.”

  “I shouldn’t say so,” Prosper said.

  “Well and you?” the salesman asked him.

  “Ah. Well I was privately employed.”

  “Ah.”

  They said no more for a long time. Prosper studied the places they

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 45

  passed, that seemed to come into being merely by his entering them, and

  then to persist behind him as he and Pancho and the Zephyr made more.

  Fields and farms appearing, then after a time the outskirts of a town,

  sometimes announced with a proud sign (greenfield—a friendly

  town) and the totem pole of the local lodges and clubs, Masons, Lions,

  Odd Fellows. The last and least farms passed, then the more decrepit

  and dirtier businesses, the ice-and-coal supplier and the lumberyard,

  then the first paved streets of houses and neighborhood shops, maybe a

  mill with its strings of joined workers’ houses like city streets displaced.

  The better neighborhoods, a white church or a stone one, big houses

  with wide yards and tended shrubbery, but the biggest one an undertak-

  ers’. Then downtown, brick buildings of three and four stories, hero on

  a plinth, the larger churches, a domed granite courthouse on Court-

  house Square.

  “Well take a good look,” said Pancho a little bitterly when Prosper

  noted these trim towns, each different but all alike. “These places

  won’t last. They’ll be drained of population. They’re the past, these old

  mills. People’ll go where the work is, and that’s the big plants in the big

  cities or the new cities now a-building. That’s the future.”

  “I’d like to see the future,” Prosper said. “All the wonders.”

  “You are a Candide,” Pancho said. “You think this is the best of all

  possible worlds. Or will be.”

  “I can’t be a Candide,” said Prosper.

  “And why not?”

  “Because I’ve read the book.”

  Esso station, five-and-dime, A & P. Pancho contemned the big chain

  stores, displacing local businesses, substituting standardized needs and

  ways of meeting them for individual taste and satisfaction.

  “They say that this new finance capitalism’s efficient. Actually it’s

  inefficient, and the more the owners are divorced from the operations

  of it the more inefficient it can get. They claim ‘efficiency of scale’—

  they don’t know that when you scale something up it doesn’t always

  work the same. It’s just as when a great corporation claims the same

  right as an individual to the freedoms guaranteed by our forefathers in

  1776. A nice piece of sophistry. As if Nabisco was not different from a

  man running his own bakeshop here in this town.”

  The bakeshop Pancho pointed to looked welcoming. It was called

  46 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  Mom’s and had red-and-white calico curtains in the window, and Pros-

  per thought of calling a halt to buy some supplies, but Pancho hunched

  over the wheel seemed unlikely to hear, and then Mom’s was gone, and

  the Ball Building, and the fire station. The railroad tracks, after which

  the houses grew poorer and fewer, some streets of Negroes, then

  scarcer, with vacant lots and abandonment (the hard times hardly

  gone) until once more fields and farms began, much like the earlier

  ones but not them. Tractors plowing in contour lines like marcelled

  brown hair, because spring was rushing upward toward them as they

  went down.

  Sometime after dark they came upon a long low establishment

  roofed in Spanish tile (so Pancho said it was) with a floodlit sign in

  front that commanded that they dine-dance and offered them steaks

  chops chicken, though it was unlikely that it’d have much of that

  these days, or much of anything to drink either, but by then the

  Zephyr’d been traveling a long time; the road had been bare of other

  choices, and didn’t look to be getting better.

  “It’s a law of life,” Pancho said. “Turn down the pretty-good place

  and you’ll wander for hours and find nothing as good, end up in a

  greasy spoon just closing its doors. Trust me. Years on the road.”

  Attached to this place was a cinder block motel, red-tiled too: a

  string of red-painted doors, each with a wicker chair beside it and a

  window with a calico curtain like Mom’s bakery. Prosper thought that

  calico curtains were perhaps to be a feature of travel, and made a note

  to watch for more. He had never left the city of his birth before.

  “Mo-tel,” Pancho said. “Motor-hotel. A hotel, but one without

  bellhops, a cigar stand, newspapers, a front desk, room service, a West-

  ern Union office, or any other of the common amenities.”

  “Two dollars a night,” Prosper said, pointing to a sign.

  “You have an endless capacity to be pleased,” Pancho said gravely.

  “That is an enviable quality in youth, and a good thing for a traveler to

  have.”

  The room that the key given to Pancho let them into was small and

  spare, and clad in honey-colored knotty pine, a thing that Prosper had

  never seen or smelled before—like living in a hollow tree, he thought.

  A single lamp between the two beds was shaped to resemble a large

  cactus and a sleeping Mexican. The beds were narrow and the pillows

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 47

  ungenerous; there was a shower but no tub. A rag rug on the linoleum

  floor nearly caught a crutch and spilled him: Prosper was opposed to

  linoleum floors, and to rag rugs. But still he loved the place immedi-

  ately, and would come to love all motels, with but one shallow stair up

  to the little cloister that protected the doors, sometimes not even that,

  out of the car and in, and there you were.

  He deposited his knapsack and Pancho lugged in a suitcase and his

  sample cases, washed his hands, and they went to eat in the wide build-

  ing fronting the motel. Prosper had never been in one of these either,

  though he knew right aw
ay what name to call it: the air of weary gaiety,

  glow of the cigarette machine, couple drinking over there with another

  male whose role was unguessable, blond waitress with challenging eyes

  and bitter mouth— “ A roadhouse,” he said to Pancho. “Just like in

  True Story.”

  “Just like in what true story?” Pancho asked.

  Prosper told him to never mind.

  There were, amid the items crossed off on the menu, enough to

  make a meal, and whiskey, a surprise. They each ordered one. Pancho,

  having rapidly downed his, described to Prosper the principles of Besto-

  pianism, which he claimed were in fact not different from the principles

  of natural life and common sense. “This isn’t hard,” he said. “You ask:

  What makes a person happy? Not one thing that will make all men

  everywhere happy, but this person here and now. And next question,

  How’s he going to get it? That’s all. Answer those questions. Let every

  person answer the first. Society should answer the second.”

  “Uh-huh,” Prosper said. “So what’s the answer?”

  Pancho regarded him with a penetrating look, and for the first time

  Prosper discerned the penetration might be due to a slight cast in one

  of his close-set wide-open eyes. It made for a furious or accusatory

  look Prosper didn’t think he meant.

  “The answer,” he said, “is the wholesale reorganization of human

  society so that the natural impulses of humankind are allowed free

  development.”

  “Aha.” It was clear to Prosper that he was not saying this for the

  first time. “And what are these impulses, would you say?”

  Pancho placed his hands on the table in oracular fashion. “You

  know. Think a minute, you’ll be able to make a list. We are made by

  48 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  Nature with these desires, yet every political system and moral system

  is bent on repressing or extinguishing them—either by force or by con-

  vincing us our natures are evil and must be repressed. As if that were

  possible. As if the industrial society could crush our desires for variety,

  for pleasure, for worth, for interest, for satisfaction. As if two incom-

  patible people locked in the legal institution of marriage could force

  themselves to love, when their deep, true, innocent passions remain

  unfulfilled.”

  “You mean,” Prosper asked, “free love?”

  “Free love, truly free, isn’t possible now. In a society rotten with