Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  der spent two childhood years was still around long years after he

  left it. It was one of those great brown-brick institutions that were built

  to mark a city like Prosper’s as forward-looking, scientific, up-to-date.

  Two others weren’t far away: the reform school, and the state school for

  mental defectives. They had opened one after the other, starting with

  the state school twenty years before Prosper was born, public ceremo-

  nies and speeches from grandstands fronted with bunting, the buildings

  in brown photographs looking raw and alone on their wide plots of

  treeless land. They’re all gone now: the state school abandoned and der-

  elict, the reform school torn down for an office building, Prosper’s hos-

  pital subsumed into a medical center and unrecognizable. But such

  places remained, though having changed their meaning: from works of

  benevolence they became dark holes in our child society, places to which

  the failed and the unlucky were remanded. You too if you put a foot

  wrong. You’re gonna end up in reform school. They remain in our

  dreams.

  Prosper was nine years old before the curvature of his spine became

  something out of the ordinary and started gaining him nicknames, and

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  looks, pitying or repelled or amused. The few doctors his mother took

  him to (for diphtheria, when he nearly died; for tonsilitis, his tonsils

  snipped with a miniature garotte; for a broken thumb) all told her that

  he’d grow out of it, most kids did. He didn’t. In the fourth grade he was

  sent to a special class for the first time, as much for dreamy inattention

  and a kind of cheerful solipsism as for his back and his pigeon-toed

  knee-rubbing walk; he’d go in and out of special classes like a relapsing

  criminal as he went from school to school, when he was allowed into

  school at all. His teacher that year, Mrs. Vinograd, took an interest in

  him; she had ideas on posture that she thought he illustrated.

  “Prosper, come here and stand before the class. Take your shirt off,

  please, dear. Yes. Now stand in profile, so the class can see clearly.”

  Cold pointer drawn down his naked back. “You see how Prosper’s

  spine differs from the normal spine. Here it curves in where ours are

  straight. This pushes the abdomen forward and causes the chest to

  recede.” Taps of the pointer, front and back. Prosper loved and feared

  Mrs. Vinograd, her long torso arising high and straight from her solid

  hips like a hero’s statue from its pedestal, her eyes large, darkest brown

  and all-seeing; and he didn’t know whether to exaggerate for her the

  sticking out of his tummy, to illustrate her remarks, or to straighten

  up, as she otherwise wanted him to do. “Doctors call it the Kit Bag

  Stoop. As though Prosper were carrying a kit bag, that pulls his

  shoulders back and down. And what is the cause of this deformity,

  whose real name is lordosis?” They all knew, all called out. “Yes,

  that’s right, boys and girls, the cause is Poor Posture. Prosper you may

  dress again, and take your seat. Ah, ah, ah! Posteriors against our seat

  backs, dears, chin high, head straight above our shoulders!” There

  were those who laughed when Mrs. Vinograd said “posterior,” but she

  would take notice of that, and no one wanted to follow Prosper and be

  ordered to exhibit other forms of Poor Posture, the Obesity Stoop, the

  Dentist’s Stoop (“from eternally bending over patients to extract

  teeth, don’t you see, dears”), or the scoliosis that brings on Da Costa’s

  Syndrome and Irritable Heart.

  Mrs. Vinograd was sure Prosper could fully straighten himself out,

  and if he could he would do better in school, and be able to pay closer

  attention to what was said to him, and sleep better and awake refreshed;

  distortion of the food-pipe was giving him digestive problems, she

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  thought (she had come to his house, right to the house where he lived, to

  talk this over with his mother), and indigestion was making him logy. It

  had once been believed, she said, that nervousness, irritability, bashful-

  ness, torpidity, and so on were causes of Poor Posture. Now it was under-

  stood that Poor Posture itself induces those conditions! Isn’t that

  remarkable? Mrs. Olander, nearly as awed as Prosper was to have opened

  the door and found towering Mrs. Vinograd on the step in velvet cloche

  and cape, could only murmur assent and shake her head at the strange-

  ness of it all, as Prosper in his seat pulled himself up, up, up.

  He tried hard not to give in to the spine within him, which seemed

  to want to settle, relax, soften, and give up on holding him upright.

  Secretly though, unsaid even to himself, he wanted to take its side,

  sorry for the continual effort he demanded of it. And since the lordosis

  never got better, he guessed he had done that, somehow thus winning

  and losing at once. That’s how it seemed, later on, when he examined

  how he had felt then, as a kid; which was like someone looking back at

  how once he’d struggled to find his way lost in the woods, just a while

  before he fell off a cliff.

  Prosper was a war baby; his father was a soldier, or became one the

  day after Prosper was conceived. On the night before he’d left for Over

  There (though actually he’d never got nearer to the front than a desk at

  Fort Devens) he’d got his wife pregnant. She had a long-standing horror

  of pregnancy that she could never account for and was ashamed to feel;

  the next many months as Prosper grew steadily within were filled with

  a dread she never spoke of and yet efficiently communicated. Not to

  Prosper; but certainly to her husband, home on leave, hovering at the

  bedroom door and wondering what to do, wondering if she would die,

  or sicken irremediably.

  Like all the women in her family Prosper’s mother-to-be was a

  believer in Maternal Impression: if you witness a bloody accident while

  pregnant, your child can be born with a port-wine stain; hear a piece

  of dreadful news (the kind that all in a day can turn your hair to gray)

  and the fetus can squirm in revulsion within you (hadn’t the women

  felt this, or heard that it had happened to someone?) and at birth it

  might appear wrong way around, unable to be got at. So she stayed

  indoors, and wouldn’t answer the telephone for fear of what she’d hear,

  and sat and felt her substance looted and applied to the new being, as

  106 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  you rob clay from the big snake you’ve rolled to make the little one.

  Nothing bad happened, except that she grew hugely fat with little to do

  but consider her cravings and try to replace her lost insides. When he

  appeared at last, held aloft by his ankles, Prosper seemed just fine, long

  and blood speckled, and with a huge dark scrotum and penis (an illu-

  sion or temporary engorgement that nearly put a Maternal Impression

  for good on his mother’s spooked heart to see).

  Kids growing up, especially the singletons, don’t consider their par-

  ents to have particular natures, or characters that can be named
; they

  love them or fear them or struggle with them or rest in them, as though

  they were the weather, or a range of mountains. When Prosper was

  eight or nine, a girl who lived in the upstairs apartment described his

  father as a Gloomy Gus, and Prosper, baffled at first, was astonished to

  feel, as he repeated the words to himself, the great enveloping cloud of

  his father shrink and coalesce into just a person, a person of a certain

  kind, a small broody man in a derby and a pin-collar shirt, carrying a

  sample case, eternally stooped, the Salesman’s Stoop.

  Maybe he was just made that way. There was no reason for Gloomy

  Gus in the funnies to be gloomy except that he was, as there was no

  reason for his brother Happy Hooligan to be happy. That his father’s

  gloom might have a cause was a further step in perception; but it may

  not ever have occurred to Prosper at all that the cause was Prosper

  himself, or—even tougher—that his father regarded him as a plenty

  good reason, a source of troubles. There was the damage done to his

  wife’s soul by Prosper’s tenancy of her body. Then the weakness of

  Prosper’s own body, which was somehow responsible for all that had

  gone wrong in those nine months, and was still wrong. Eventually the

  doctor bills, and the prospect of more of the same, endlessly. The mis-

  aligned boy scuffling beside him as he walked the street, every eye on

  them (he believed) in curious pity. All Prosper knew was that a light-

  ness would possess him when his father set out on the road, gone for

  days sometimes; and a contrary melancholy sunset at the man’s return.

  For that he now had a name. He even had, in the name, a justification

  for wishing he’d not return: for the doing of magic in various home-

  made forms to insure that he stay away, delay, be stuck in snow or in

  badlands, never darken the door again. And one day he left, as usual,

  and then didn’t return. Just didn’t, and wasn’t heard from ever after.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 107

  This time, strangely, having left his two sample cases behind. Prosper,

  awed and gratified about as much as he was guilty and stilled, would

  open the closet door now and then to look at those dark leather lumps,

  his father’s other body, still remaining.

  For a time he watched and waited to see if his mother would hate

  him for her husband’s disappearance, which she might suspect her son

  had brought about by his little deals with the powers—avoiding the

  cracks on the sidewalk, wishing on dandelion moons and train whis-

  tles—and for a time she did regard him in something like reproachful

  grief. But he was convinced she was as much better off without Gloomy

  Gus as he felt himself to be; and she almost never mentioned him. She

  was, as she said herself, not much of a talker. There was so much family

  surrounding them, and so many of those were disconnected from

  spouses or otherwise out of the ordinary (two aunts, one each of his

  mother’s and his father’s sisters, who lived together; an uncle and his

  wife and nearly grown kids living in a nearby house with another single

  uncle in a spare room; a grampa a few blocks away cared for by a

  grandniece; others whose connection to himself and one another he

  had not yet worked out) that the jigsaw puzzle piece that was Prosper’s

  part, though changed now in shape, still fit all right.

  And the vanishing of his father (and their income with him) brought

  to his house—at the instigation of those various uncles and aunts and

  others, his mother wouldn’t have known to do it, though Prosper knew

  nothing of all that—a caseworker from the city welfare bureau. Her

  name was Mary Mack, and she wasn’t dressed in black black black but

  favored tartans and a tam and was the most beautiful person Prosper

  had looked upon up to that time, her bright kindly eyes and the plain

  sturdy way she plunked down her mysterious buckled bag, from which

  she drew out printed forms and other things. Even his mother smiled to

  see her coming down the street (she and Prosper keeping watch at the

  window on the appointed days), though his mother always made it

  clear to him that Miss Mack’s visits were nobody’s business but theirs

  and shouldn’t be mentioned anywhere in any company.

  Anyway it was another society that engaged most of Prosper’s alle-

  giance and concern then, the one made up of personages that grown-

  ups don’t see or hardly see, as unknown to them as the society of bugs

  in the weeds, only brought to notice if they sting or fly at you repul-

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  sively: the neighborhood’s kids. The map of their world overlay the one

  they shared with their elders (the one marked with the church and the

  other church and the market and the streetcar stop and the school and

  the public baths and the free clinic), the same geography but with dif-

  ferent landmarks: Death Valley, which was what they called a treeless

  waste between the back of the bowling alley and the Odd Fellows

  lodge, where treks and battles happened; the nailed-up—but by them

  reopened—three-hole privy in the scruffy woods in the slough behind

  the big hotel, why there, who knew, but ritual required it to be used

  each time it was passed, by all, girls, boys, young, old, leaders, follow-

  ers; the railroad bridge abutment where the hoboes slept, where over

  scrapwood fires they cooked their beans and luckless kids’ body parts.

  Prosper wasn’t the only funny-looking or oddly shaped one among

  them; any neighborhood gang could show a kid, Wally Brannigan was

  theirs, who illustrated with a sightless peeled-grape eyeball the inces-

  sant adult warning about what happens when you play with sharp

  sticks and improvised bows. Little Frankie No-last-name had had rick-

  ets and walked with an invisible melon between his legs. Sharon was

  hugely tall, like Olive Oyl. Only Frankie and Prosper among them

  found it hard to keep up, and Frankie was younger than the others and

  weepy and didn’t count, which left Prosper at the bottom of the heap,

  helped along sometimes, or mocked, or nicknamed; by one or two of

  the strong, actively despised. He could hit a baseball pretty well, though

  sometimes a big swing caused him to lose his balance and fall in a

  heap, and he rarely beat the throw to first. Then a designated runner

  was assigned to him, the biggest kid on their side, who had to piggy-

  back Prosper to the bag. Hit the ball, leap onto Christopher’s back, be

  carried at a jouncing run, laughing and sometimes falling together in

  stomach-aching hilarity halfway down the base path while the rest of

  the field looked on in disgust—but sometimes bearing down with bared

  teeth at full gallop, scaring off the first baseman and stamping across

  the base.

  It was Mary Wilma who decided it was not against the rules for

  Prosper to be carried by the pinch runner, in fact she determined that

  it was required. Mary Wilma was the smartest kid among them, or at

  least the most decisive; if something needed to be settled, Mary Wilma

  came out with a plan before anybody e
lse had even had time to decide

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 109

  what was what, and if she met disagreement she was loud and definite

  in pointing out why she was right and the other was wrong, which was

  usually the case.

  “Mary Wilma, I don’t want to do your idea.”

  “Well it’s smarter than your idea. Prove it isn’t!”

  “I don’t care. I just don’t want to.”

  “Tell me why you don’t, stupid bubuncle! Idioso! Come on! I’ll

  believe you if you can tell me!”

  She said or shouted them, her directives and her made-up insults,

  with such fierce delight, her big dark eyes aflame and big mouth smil-

  ing, that it was hard to hate her, though everybody at some time said

  they did; and it was after all she who organized the great watermelon

  theft, and the Halloween bonfire extravaganza, and the nighttime

  kick-the-can eliminations. She liked to stage field days, and kept care-

  ful score: she ran faster than anybody else, not that she was so fast a

  runner, or longer legged, she just put so much concentrated heat into it,

  more than anyone else could summon or cared to summon, her legs

  scissoring and her eyes fixed on the goal.

  Mary Wilma took an intense interest in Prosper, thinking up things

  he had to do to keep up, ways to put him to use, ways to insult him

  too.

  “Here comes Prosper on his little horsie!” Meaning his odd tippety

  gait, it took Prosper a while to figure that out; Mary Wilma never said

  anything meaningless, though it might at first seem so. “What’s your

  little horsie’s name, Prosper? Is it a hoobie horsie?”

  Of course he yelled back the meanest things he could think of, which

  amused her further, expert boxer or knife fighter challenged by a child;

  but he stayed near her, if only because it lessened the likelihood of his

  getting beaten up, chances of which went up after he started having to

  wear a back brace of leather and buckles and metal. Mrs. Vinograd

  made the horrible error—mortal, irreversible, to Prosper—of calling

  this device a Boston girdle. Which was its name, in fact, but which

  when said out loud before the class was curtains for the wearer. Mary

  Wilma on the playground or in the alleys liked to name it too, at top

  volume, and it was she who began then to call Prosper Coozie Modo,