Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  which even those who hadn’t gone to see Lon Chaney tormented in the

  movie (Prosper hadn’t) knew to be a killing taunt. Never mind: if he

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  stayed near her he wouldn’t be kicked or pelted with dingbats—those

  who liked the idea of doing that were also the ones most afraid of Mary

  Wilma, her needle-sharp sense of each of their weaknesses and inade-

  quacies; and she didn’t allow group activities she hadn’t conceived of.

  Her family had a house a few blocks from Prosper’s, a whole house

  that they rented part of to others but whose basement and attic and

  weedy garden and shed were all theirs, a huge domain, and she brought

  Prosper there and took him all through it. She revealed its arcana to

  him only slowly, watching his reaction to certain mysterious or alarm-

  ing items as though he might not rise to the occasion, as though others

  before him perhaps had not: in the basement ancient pickled things in

  jars of murky fluid, which she claimed were babies but surely were only

  pig’s feet or tongues; in the shed a black metal hook that she said had

  once served her grandfather as a hand, its brutal rusted tip still sharp—

  what had the old man done with it, to whom? She menaced Prosper

  with it, and he didn’t flinch, though he wouldn’t touch it himself.

  Anyway maybe it wasn’t what she said it was, because she was a big

  liar, as Prosper told her, as everybody told her; she didn’t seem to

  mind.

  “Go on,” she said, pushing him from behind. They went up the

  halls to the top of the house, where a rope hung that pulled down a

  flight of stairs leading to the attic. “You probably never saw this

  before,” she said as the staircase descended gently, treads rotating into

  place. He shrugged nonchalantly, but he hadn’t. Mary Wilma had just

  had her black hair bobbed, and Prosper couldn’t stop looking at the

  tendons of her neck and the hollow between, like a boy’s now but not

  like a boy’s. “Up we go, little Prosper,” she said. “Up up up.” When

  they had gone up through the hole in the ceiling Mary Wilma pulled

  up the stair behind them. It seemed to take no effort at all; Prosper

  wondered why not.

  There were other mysteries to be revealed in the dry dim warmth. A

  harmonium whose cracked and mouse-chewed bellows could only

  wheeze spooky groans like a consumptive or the ghost of one. A dress

  dummy she hugged, calling out Ma, Ma. The dust on these things and

  in the air, the slatted windows always open, the squeak of the gray

  boards underfoot, which were so obviously the ceiling of the rooms

  below.

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  She had them play cards there on the floor with a wrinkled and dog-

  eared deck. Go Fish. Slapjack. Then she taught him another one, a

  good one she said, a better one. It was called Lightning. She laid out a

  row of cards for herself and one for him, in complicated fashion making

  piles and moving cards from one to the other.

  “Now you take the bottom card of the first pile and put it on top of

  the pile in the middle. No in the middle. No across-ways. That’s the

  Boodle. You leave that there strictly alone. Now hold out your cards.”

  She bent forward to transfer cards from his hand to hers and hers to

  his. Some were laid down.

  “Prosper! Not there! I told you!”

  “You said before—”

  “Now we have to start all over. Put down eight piles of three

  cards . . .”

  “It was seven before.”

  She reached to grab his shirt, disordering the cards that were spread

  in arcane ways over the floor between them. “You listen! Eight piles of

  three!”

  “You said before—”

  “Do it!” she said.

  He threw down his cards. “You’re just making it up. There isn’t any

  game at all, just rules.”

  She was laughing. “It’s fun! It’s a good game. You must do it.”

  Her face was very close to his. “Stop being mean, Mary Wilma,” he

  said. “Why are you so mean? Did somebody beat you with the mean

  stick?”

  She almost fell into him laughing, her laughter seeming to say that

  he’d found out her secret or maybe that he was the funniest person in

  the world, fixing him at the same time with her wide unbreakable gaze.

  “Prosper!” she cried, as though he were a block away. “The mean

  stick?”

  “Yes!” he said, unable not to laugh too, and then she had grabbed

  him again by the shirt.

  “Prosper!” She’d stopped laughing, her fierce hilarity remaining

  though. “Let’s take your pants off!”

  He didn’t look away. “Let’s take yours off.”

  She instantly did, reaching up under her dress and pulling down.

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  She lifted both bare legs in the air and slipped over her shoes the little

  white bundle. Just as he did it himself every night. “Now you,” she

  said.

  Everybody grows up by leaps, and not by a steady climb like a

  mountaineer’s. As though he had just been pulled up by the hair to

  look over an enclosing ridge, Prosper hung in a space of Mary Wilma’s

  creating, unable then to confute or even really to perceive what she had

  done: she had taken off her pants but given nothing away, yet she had

  certainly gone first, leaving him to go next, fair’s fair. All that Mary

  Wilma was, and did, and would be; all that he was and knew, all now

  altered. He started unbuttoning.

  Afterward he always said, when he would ask her (or she would say,

  inviting him), Let’s go play Lightning: and a few times up in the attic

  they did lay out cards in Mary Wilma’s meaningless arrangements. But

  these nongames became briefer and then were forgotten even though

  the name remained as the name for what they did do. Mary Wilma,

  after she had played that first trick on Prosper, was as willing as he was

  to reveal, whipping off her jumper with practiced celerity as Prosper

  stood before her, new flesh extruding strangely but interestingly from

  him. “Now what’s this, ” she would cry, her hand shooting like a bird’s

  claw to snatch it, gripping as though it might fly away. “What’s this

  supposed to be! Huh, Prosper? What?”

  As often though she liked to play a pretend game, as though naked-

  ness relieved her of the heavy responsibilities of leadership and returned

  her to an earlier time in her life when the world could all be invented.

  She became or played a vague helpless party, moving as though under

  water or in a dream, her act for Prosper. “Oh gee”—absent, distrait—

  “oh look I have forgot my pants, oh dear. Here I am outside and no

  cloath-es, what will I do. Oh my oh dear they all see me, oh they see

  my posterior, oh boy, my buttawks, ooh what will I do. I will sit here

  and wait for the trolley.” Her head lolled, she parted her legs where she

  sat on an old trunk. “Oh dear now I must pee pee, now what, oh well

  oh well I guess I just will, dum de dum de dum, can’t help it, ooh

  oops.” The first time the game reached this point she just
pretended,

  making a sissing noise as her hands feebly grasped air, and the second

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  time too; but the third time, she lifted her dusty knees and regarded

  Prosper with a face that mixed a hot triumphant Mary Wilma chal-

  lenge into the fey person she was pretending to be; then she let go,

  water spraying from the cleft in the girl way, not like his own straight

  stream, wetting the box and the gray floor. His face and breast hot

  with amazement and elation.

  What they did in the attic (that word attic ever after retaining a

  shadow of secret warm shared exposure for him) didn’t change Mary

  Wilma’s ways out in the world with the others, and only later on did it

  occur to him what a chance she’d taken with him, how brave she’d

  been, those things they did together were riskier for her than any crazy

  brave thing she’d ever done, than climbing up to the railroad bridge

  from the river, than letting Hoopie Morris shoot her in her winter-

  coated back with his air rifle to prove it wasn’t fatal like Hoopie stu-

  pidly claimed: because Prosper could have told on her. He could, as she

  certainly knew; as she would certainly have told on someone if she

  needed to, to maintain her place. You know what Mary Wilma does?

  Yelled someday when she bossed him or mocked him, as she never

  stopped doing. You know what Mary Wilma does? And she would

  instantly have been toppled as leaders in the news were; her power

  would have vanished. Tears of rage, he could almost see it. Why would

  she take that chance?

  Because (Vi Harbison told Prosper in Henryville, having heard a

  brief version of this, the first anecdote or instance Prosper offered,

  though not one that in Vi’s opinion counted) because she trusted Pros-

  per not to.

  But why did she think she could trust him, Prosper wanted to know;

  and if Vi knew, or had an idea, she didn’t say.

  It didn’t go on long, but it didn’t end because one or both of them

  decided to quit, or chickened out, not at all, but only because (as nearly

  as Prosper could figure it later) it was just at that time that he was dis-

  covered by the Odd Fellows, and went away to the hospital, and all

  that happened thereafter began to happen, one thing falling into the

  next and the next, until at last he wasn’t even living in the same neigh-

  borhood, and—though this he never knew—neither was she. What

  became of them all, she and Hoopie and Wally and the others whose

  names he couldn’t recall, those he had once spent all day with, in school

  114 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  or after, on Saturdays and Sundays? He rarely thought about them

  afterward, but they certainly were a Passionate Series as Pancho Notz-

  ing would later describe it to him—lovers of power and lovers of plea-

  sure, the greedy and the indifferent, the retiring and the unhesitating,

  an entire spectrum of human temperaments, needs, and wants, enough

  anyway to make a complete society, the only one he’d ever know him-

  self to be a member of until he came to live and work among the Teenie

  Weenies still far away then in time and space.

  2

  That orthopedic hospital, though a source of civic pride pictured

  on postcards that visitors to town could buy, was not used as

  much as the founders and supporters had expected: not enough

  people willing to go have the clubfoot or the gimp leg they’d

  lived with for years corrected, or with enough money to pay for it. So

  the local chapter of the International Order of Odd Fellows (whose

  building, with its name at once comical and sinister, had hung over the

  wasteland where Prosper’s gang had played ball) volunteered to survey

  the county and learn who was in need, who could be helped, especially

  among the children; and to raise the money to pay for the surgeries of

  some. It was Mrs. Vinograd who brought Prosper to their attention,

  Prosper and one or two others she had observed as well. Despite her

  belief that Poor Posture could be overcome by will and self-control,

  Mrs. Vinograd also believed in doctors and the advance of Medicine;

  she believed in efficiency, in principle and in practice. She didn’t tell

  Prosper or his mother what she had done, though, and when the two

  moon-faced men in great double-breasted suits appeared at the Olan-

  ders’ door and announced who they were and their interest in Prosper,

  he assumed that they had come to claim him as one of their own: an

  Odd Fellow, as they were; the lodge he was a member of.

  When it became clearer what the two wide smilers actually meant

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  by coming there, Prosper’s mother lifted four fingers to her chin in

  doubt or fear. “Oh dear,” she said.

  “Get you some help, you see,” said one, gently, knowing to whom

  he spoke.

  “Well he’s been fine this far,” she said.

  “But he could be fixed right up,” said the other Odd Fellow, and

  tousled Prosper’s hair as though he were six, or a dog.

  “Oh but an operation,” Prosper’s mother said. “An operation?”

  “At no cost to you now or ever,” said the first, a salesman.

  “But what about his schooling? That’s important too.”

  “We’re just here to make sure the boy gets examined, ma’am.” He

  drew out from within his capacious jacket a memorandum book and a

  gold pen; and they all turned to Prosper.

  Examined. To see, first, if it really was possible to fix him right up.

  On a sloppy winter day Prosper and his mother took the streetcar to

  the hospital, which stood on a rise above a raw new neighborhood on

  the other side of the city. They had to cross a construction site on duck-

  boards, then climb up a path and two flights of stairs to reach the

  doors. There they made themselves known at the window, waited on a

  bench in the echoey strange-smelling waiting room where hortatory

  posters had been put up. His mother lifted her eyes to one after another,

  patted her bosom, moaned almost inaudibly. One showed a funny man

  about to sneeze, finger beneath his nose, and warned that coughing,

  sneezing, spitting spread influenza! Another showed a family

  man, his wife and child cowering behind him, desperately trying to

  keep shut a door on the outer darkness where a vague white hideous

  specter was trying to come in. Tuberculosis. Shutting the door on the

  thing looked hopeless, though it wasn’t probably supposed to.

  After a long time a nurse all in white, even to her shoes, called their

  name and led them down wide high corridors across floors more highly

  polished than any Prosper had ever seen, gleaming tile seeming to

  vanish beneath his muddy feet as though he walked on water. Doors

  opened on either side and he glimpsed people being ministered to, lift-

  ing legs or arms with nurses’ help or playing slow games with big balls.

  They were shown into a room to wait with other young people, other

  culls of the Odd Fellows he supposed, some of them glad to see people

  in their own case and lifting hands in salute or recognition, some who

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E E D O M S / 117

  wouldn’t meet his eyes. One a delicate pale girl with white-blond hair

  carefully marcelled, her spine so out of true it seemed she had been cut

  in two across the middle and the two parts put back together incor-

  rectly. She shrank farther away as Prosper helplessly stared, as though

  she could feel the gaze she couldn’t meet, and his mother at last pulled

  his hand to make him stop.

  The young doctor he was finally taken to see—hawk-faced, his hair

  laid tight against his head with Wildroot oil, its odor unmistakable,

  the same that Prosper’s father had used—made one judgment right

  away. Prosper was to stop using the Boston girdle: it could do him no

  good, the doctor said. He took it from Prosper and with thumb and

  finger held it up, fouled with sweat and other things, edge-worn and

  splitting, as though it were some vermin he had shot. Prosper’s heart

  lifted.

  Then he was taken, more wonderful still, to have an X-ray, the

  nurse telling him it wouldn’t hurt and would show what the inside of

  his body and his bones looked like, but Prosper knew all that, and

  stepped up bared to the waist smartly and efficiently, put his breast and

  then each side and his back against the glass as the doctor showed him;

  it didn’t hurt, though he was sure he felt pass through him coldly the

  rays without a name. Then that was all. Back through the waiting

  room, still unable to make the pale girl see him, along the corridors

  and through the doors and down the steps and home. Three weeks

  later a letter came from the hospital saying that he was being consid-

  ered as a candidate for surgical correction of spinal lordosis, and set-

  ting another date for more examinations.

  Prosper couldn’t know it, but even that first uneventful journey into

  the hospital had nearly undone his mother. He did know that she was

  someone to whom you couldn’t bring your bleeding body parts to be

  bandaged, as she would faint, or say she was about to, and turn away

  white-faced and trembling; also best not to tell her you’d thrown up, or

  had sat on the pot with the gripes until a load of hot gravy was passed

  that flecked the bowl and lid. These things were for you to know. Long

  afterward, in one of those reassessments that come upon us unwilled,

  like a sudden shift of perspective in a movie scene that shows the lurk-