Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  people received a real competence for their labors, or simply as a birth-

  right, they could just refuse poor food until it was replaced with better.

  “And what did they say they’d be putting you to doing?” he asked

  Prosper.

  “Well they didn’t,” Prosper said. “As I was explaining, there.” He

  gestured to the counter. Pancho looked over his shoulder; the woman

  Prosper had spoken to passed a glance in their direction, maybe a hint

  of a smile, and away again.

  56 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  Day Shift workers went into the Van Damme works through a bank of

  glass doors, even as the Victory Shift workers exited through another

  bank, looking worn and depleted. The heels of incoming workers made

  a din on the tiled floor; Prosper was like a stick in a stream as they

  swept around him, and he had to be careful not to get kicked and lose

  his footing—they gave him space, when they saw him, but they didn’t

  always see him. Prosper had washed his face in a Conoco gas station

  toilet, but his cheeks were stubbly and his collar gray; he felt a cold

  apprehension he hadn’t felt yesterday.

  Where the entrance narrowed to stream the workers past the time

  clocks, he handed the cards he’d been given to the clerk behind a

  window there, who saw something on them that caused him to pick up

  a phone. He flipped a switch on his PBX and waited a time, regarding

  Prosper with steady indifference; he spoke a name into the phone, hung

  it up, and pointed to where Prosper was to stand and wait. Pancho had

  long since gone into the interior beyond. Prosper had time to fill up

  with a familiar but always surprising anxiety as the workers went past

  him, some glancing his way. Far more women than men, like a city

  avenue where the department stores are.

  “Olander?”

  Prosper stepped forward. The man who’d called his name, without

  actually looking for him, was a long thin S-shaped man, knobby wrists

  protruding from his sleeves. He wore a tie and round horn-rims. He

  motioned to Prosper to follow him along into the plant.

  “Through here.”

  Prosper Olander had never been in a cathedral, but now he felt

  something like that, the experience of entering suddenly a space so

  large, so devoted to a single purpose, that the insides of the heart are

  drawn for a moment outward and into it, trying to fill it, and failing. It

  wasn’t perpendicular like a cathedral, or still and echoey, it was loud

  under long high banks of lights; but it was so huge, and the numbers of

  people and tasks that filled it so many, that it took a moment before

  Prosper’s stretched senses even perceived that what was being scram-

  bled over and attended to were units, were all alike, were the bodies of

  airplanes. Even then he could doubt the perception: was it really pos-

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 57

  sible that things this big (and still they were only parts of things that

  would have to be a lot bigger, reason told you that) were meant to fly?

  For a second you could feel that they were something more like brood-

  ing hens, and the workers were helping them lay and hatch the actual

  airplane-sized airplanes out of their vast insides.

  The supervisor or foreman he followed, as he would come to know,

  was Rollo Stallworthy, and a kinder man than he appeared. Prosper

  followed after him as fast as he could down what would have been the

  cathedral’s nave, between the plane bodies on either side, Rollo giving

  no quarter. Prosper could travel fast but not for long, and eventually he

  had to stop; Rollo Stallworthy after a moment’s solo progress divined

  something was wrong and looked back to where Prosper panted.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” Prosper said. “Just give me a minute.”

  Just then a very large man consulting with others at one of the long

  tables that at every station held blueprints and paper in piles caught

  sight of Prosper, and signaled he’d like a word.

  Prosper waited. Rollo nodded respectfully to the big man and put

  his hands behind his back.

  “New hire?” said the man. His face was the size of a pie and crossed

  with gold-framed eyeglasses. Prosper nodded. The man pointed to his

  legs and his back.

  “Tabes dorsalis?” he asked.

  “No,” Prosper said.

  “Been to the health clinic?” the man said. Prosper thought he’d

  never seen such yardage of seersucker expended on a single suit. “Got

  your health card?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on over. May well be something they can do for you.”

  “All right,” said Prosper.

  “Carry on,” the man said cheerily, and turned back to his table.

  “That was him,” Rollo said as he set the pace again. He grinned

  back at Prosper.

  “That was who?”

  “Himself. Henry the Great. Here on an inspection tour. He doesn’t

  miss a thing.”

  “Well say,” Prosper said.

  58 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  “You’re fortunate he didn’t give you a pill to take,” Rollo said. “His

  pockets are full of ’em.”

  What Rollo had been given was the job of finding something for

  Prosper to do. Rollo’d already shown himself ingenious at tasks like

  this, and lay awake at night sometimes (none of his own supervisors

  knew this, they just assumed Rollo could do it and so they told him to

  do it) putting together his crews and subcrews so that everybody could

  work just as hard and fast as they were able. The short, the strong, the

  old, the weary and querulous, the whites who’d work next to blacks

  and the ones that wouldn’t, the helpful and patient ones you could put

  next to the stupid truculent ones and get the best out of both. He’d

  been thinking about this lame young man he’d been assigned, who was

  actually in worse shape (Rollo was now convinced, having studied him

  without staring rudely) than he’d been described as being by Intake.

  “All right,” he said, and they slowed beside a station that seemed

  like other stations, beneath the long unfinished hollow body of a plane,

  which was far larger to look at from beneath even than to see from the

  door. Workers were riveting panels of the aluminum skin in place, one

  outside with the gun and the other on the other side with the bucking

  bar that turned the rivet’s end (he didn’t yet know this). Rollo began

  talking in a voice so slow and deliberate it was actually hard to follow,

  though intended to be easy, describing Prosper’s job, which would

  involve assisting in keeping records of tools and materials used and

  needed at this station, new orders filled or pending. He understood

  Prosper’d not be able to take it all in right off, but a little practice

  would put that right, it wasn’t a hard job but it was exacting. And

  Prosper tried to listen, but his eyes were drawn up and around, to the

  women in their coveralls, their caps, their heavy gloves and saddle

  shoes and sloppy socks, till they began to look down at him too, and

  smile and wave and welcome him. Colored women and old women and

/>   young women of many shapes, perched on narrow footholds, handling

  power tools with grace and equanimity. The repeated tzing of those

  guns, like bullets fired every which way in movie cartoons.

  “You’ll shadow me,” Rollo said. “Till you get familiar with them

  all.”

  He seemed to mean the forms and stamps he was gesturing at, which

  Prosper at length looked down at. “Yes,” he said.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 59

  “You’ll do fine.”

  “Yes,” Prosper said. “I think I will.”

  Prosper and Pancho spent that night on couches in the men’s dormitory,

  and then got beds in the plain bare rooms there, but it wasn’t long

  before a house on Z Street became available. Despite all of Van Damme

  Aero’s efforts to attract and keep workers, the turnover rate was almost

  as high as in the rest of the war industries, people getting homesick,

  men’s deferments running out and not renewed, women quitting when

  their men were demobilized or when they’d earned enough for a down

  payment on a real house in a real place; or they just couldn’t adjust,

  despite Van Damme’s psychologists, and they went back to where

  people acted and thought the way they once supposed everyone every-

  where did.

  The Z Street family that departed sold Pancho their two beds and

  the other sticks of furniture they’d acquired, they could afford better

  now, and Prosper and Pancho picked up other things—Henryville was

  a ceaseless rummage sale of lamps and tin flatware and radios and deal

  dressers; one fringed pillow with a painted satin cover showing sunset

  over Lake George migrated from bed to couch in houses from A Street

  to 30th, holding up heads and tired feet, until it wouldn’t plump and

  was so soiled that night had fallen on its pines. The house had two

  bedrooms and a living room, and that sublessor’s door on the side, and

  a yard a little bigger than the others, but otherwise (Pancho thought)

  belonged on Devil’s Island for its cheerlessness and separation from all

  the identical others. Wave of the future he said sadly, unless things

  changed. Prosper was delighted with it. Like a motel, it had no base-

  ment, no attic, no high porch with a cliff of steps, nowhere in it he

  couldn’t go or couldn’t use, it was all his as much as it could be any-

  body’s. He stood looking out his window at the rectangles of the house

  opposite his. It was identical to his but had a carport over the minia-

  ture driveway roofed in a strange ribbed translucent green material

  Prosper’d never seen before. “Fiberglass,” said Pancho, somewhat bit-

  terly. “It’s a fabric and a wool and a plastic. No end to its uses.”

  “Nice,” said Prosper. “Keep the Zephyr dry if we had one.” Pancho

  (as Prosper had hoped) turned to eye him in disgust.

  60 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  It was on that day, as Prosper was making his way across the vast

  parking lot from where Pancho had to park among the thousands, that

  Horse Offen in his little Van Damme electric car stopped beside him to

  offer a lift. Pancho had already gone on ahead, at Prosper’s urging,

  don’t be late.

  “Say, thanks,” Prosper said, figuring a way to climb aboard as

  Horse watched with interest.

  “Don’t mind if we go a roundabout way?” Horse asked.

  “No not a bit. I’m early.” He tended to be, until he was sure how

  long a trip like this one would take him, on average.

  Horse was out with pad and camera to write up a feature for the

  Aero. He’d already done the sports scores and the winning suggestion

  of the week (some kind of improvement to a wing jig that Horse didn’t

  quite get) and needed more. He questioned Prosper as they rode, how

  long he’d needed the crutches, where he’d come from, what he’d done

  before, which seemed mostly to be not much. Nothing there for Horse.

  “Any hobbies?”

  “Well, I don’t have many of my tools here, but I like drafting and

  lettering and so on. Working with pens, commercial art.”

  “But that’s not your job here.”

  “No.”

  “Well hey. Who knows. We can use people in my shop who can do

  that kind of work. If you want to apply.”

  Prosper maintained a silence, one that Horse couldn’t know resulted

  from a kind of awed embarrassment, that what he most wanted would

  be offered him right here and now, or the hope or suggestion of it.

  “So after all this. What’s your goal?”

  After a moment’s thought, or silence anyway, Prosper said: “I would

  hope one day to achieve greatness.”

  “Aha. In what line?”

  “I don’t know that yet.”

  Horse allowed himself a laugh, but thought it sort of served him

  right, getting an answer like that in response to a tease—a “goal,” after

  all, for someone like this gangly Plastic Man with the snappy fedora.

  “Here we go,” he said. He stopped the little car and dismounted.

  They were within the central building; Prosper could see the shop num-

  bers receding into the distance, toward his own. “Well, my two gals

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 61

  aren’t here yet,” he said looking around. “Let me take your picture.

  Never know when I might use it.” Prosper lifted himself off the car, set

  himself on the shop floor, and drew himself up, insofar as he could.

  Horse thought of a title—“Aiming for Greatness”—and laughed again

  as he looked down at Prosper on the screen of the Rolleiflex. Just then

  Prosper saw behind Horse two women, a very tall one and a very short

  one, both dressed for work, but headed their way.

  Horse turned. “Ah say, how are you, ladies?”

  It seemed to Prosper that the two women knew Horse pretty well

  and treated him with a kind of impatient tolerance. “Meet our new

  employee,” Horse said, indicating Prosper. The smaller woman was

  definitely small, a midget Prosper supposed, not with the brawny

  shoulders and big head of one or two such people he’d known. The

  other, the tall one, he recognized.

  She recognized him too. “We’ve met,” she said, as though she

  thought something was amusing.

  “That’s right, we have,” Prosper said. “I don’t think I caught your

  name, though.”

  “I don’t think I tossed it.”

  Horse said the names—small Sal Mass and tall Violet Harbison,

  been around a good while, Vi plays for the Moths, the best softball

  team in the industry. As he made the introductions he conceived the

  idea of lining up all three of them and taking a picture and running it

  with some kind of joke about a sideshow or something, “So Where’s

  the Fat Lady?” but of course that was stupid. The two women, though,

  went together naturally: they worked in the same shop. No forced

  humor there. They just happened to be the shortest and the tallest. And

  Vi was a stunner in a kind of unsettling way. They both wore the flying

  “E” badges awarded for effort, and that, of course, would be the lead,

  but he still planned to call the story “The Long and the Short of It,” all

  in goo
d fun.

  Prosper watched Horse set up his shot, clicking off a surprising

  number, this way, that way. He got Sal to climb a stepladder and sit, to

  bring their two heads together. Finally he asked Vi to maybe hoist Sal

  on her shoulder, or hold her in her arms like (he didn’t add) a ventrilo-

  quist’s dummy, or something cute. They looked at each other and then

  at him, and shook their heads.

  62 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  During all that time, all that posing, Vi Harbison, untouched it

  seemed however Horse tried to catch her soul with his camera and his

  wisecracks, kept glancing toward Prosper Olander as though she’d like

  to ask a question, or make a remark, that couldn’t or oughtn’t be asked

  or made here and now, when shift was starting, both for him and for

  her; and Prosper noticed that, and his eyes answered hers as they some-

  times put it in the issues of True Story magazine he’d read, and he

  thought he knew where he stood. Both she and Sal waved as Prosper

  was carried off with Horse.

  “Tough broad,” Horse said to Prosper as he negotiated the crowded

  pathways through the building. “A ballbuster, frankly. In my humble

  opinion.”

  “The tall one? Violet?”

  “Her,” Horse said. “But the midget’s no honeydrop either.”

  6

  The Teenie Weenies all live in Teenie Weenie Town, which is hidden

  under a rosebush in a backyard not so very far away from you or

  me. The path through the town leads past the sauce dish which is

  the Teenie Weenies’ swimming pool, and the syrup can that is

  their schoolhouse, and the teapot where the Chinaman lives. A glass

  fruit jar is a greenhouse, a coffee can a workshop. Several Teenie Weenies

  live together in a house made from a shoe. The trail leads on to the

  garden and to the Big People’s house, where the Teenie Weenies some-

  times go, to find things the Big People no longer want or won’t miss.

  Today the Teenie Weenies have come upon a toy that a Big People

  child has lost. It is an aeroplane! It is made of “balsa” wood and is very

  light, though not to the Teenie Weenies. The aeroplane works by a

  rubber band, which is wound up tightly and then released to turn the

  propeller. Some of the bravest of the Teenie Weenies have decided to

  see if the plane can fly! Perhaps they will use it to fly to other places,