Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  ing villain or dropped gun that couldn’t be seen before, Prosper real-

  ized that it was actually his father who had bound up his wounds,

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  carried him to bed in fever, washed out the white enamel basin ( Hasten

  Jason bring the basin) with the horrid black chipped spots in it; and

  that therefore it had certainly cost him something when his father

  blew.

  He would think then: There are thoughts you never think until, for

  the first time, you do think them. And he would remember his father

  telling his jokes, salesman’s patter, even as he cleaned the boy that

  Prosper had been.

  It wasn’t that his mother neglected cleanliness, health, and the body.

  They were ever present to her mind, a threat and a promise she could

  never get working together. She had been raised on medicine as though

  on food: Wendigo Microbe Killer, Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, Hamlin’s

  Wizard Oil liniment, Doctor Flint’s Quaker Bitters, cod-liver oil in the

  winter and sulphured molasses in the spring. After her only child was

  born she felt she deserved Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound to

  reverse the bad effects; she sucked Smith Brothers cough drops (which

  she fed to Prosper too) and was a user of Hadacol, which she found lots

  better for her headaches than Coca-Cola. And as within, so without:

  Prosper’s earliest memory was of hearing the enormous Hoover start-

  ing up somewhere in the house, brand-new then possibly, anyway

  unknown to him, an inexplicable noise at once roar and shriek and

  coming closer; moving away; closer again, and evidently seeking him

  out where he lay in bed. Then to find the great gray floor-sucker thing

  entering his room, manipulated by his grim-faced mother, therefore

  not dangerous at all, maybe.

  His mother feared germs; her own earliest memory was watching

  her bedroom stripped of its bedclothes, curtains, and toys, to be burned

  in the alley after her scarlet fever. The Hoover was her defense, or her

  offensive, against germs, that and lye soap, naphtha flakes, carbolic,

  Old Dutch cleanser with the furious punitive bonneted figure on the

  can that Prosper took as the image of his mother’s spirit, and scrub

  brushes boiled weekly. Prosper, already afflicted by troubles that

  seemed to get worse as he grew, caused her endless worry, she almost

  feared to touch him, not only because of what he had inside him but

  because of what he might have touched in the filthy world outside.

  Once he brought home a stray dog, sick too, half-carrying it into the

  house and supposing he might be able to keep it. His mother blocked

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  him and it with a broom from entering, prodding them away desper-

  ately and calling on the deities. After that when she was sunk in her

  cleaning he could sometimes hear her mutter the dog, that dog.

  So if it had been up to her, Prosper likely wouldn’t have gone into

  that hospital or under that knife, and what would have happened

  instead was unknowable, and still is. It was Miss Mary Mack, her eyes

  and eyelashes glittering as though frosted and her cheeks red from the

  cold, who came to fetch him and bring him back there, which for all he

  then knew she did out of kindness only: kind too to his helpless inert

  mother fretting on the kitchen chair with two aprons on. Held his hand

  when they mounted to the streetcar. Prosper found a certain satisfac-

  tion, on his return, in telling his mother how blood had been taken

  from him, right from the crook of his arm where this gauze was now

  wrapped, and how he watched it rush out to fill the glass needle, thick

  and dark as beet soup.

  Just before he went into the hospital for the surgery, the Odd Fel-

  lows held a little ceremony where the check for the costs was presented

  to the hospital. The Odd Fellows ranged on the steps of the hospital

  with the director and a doctor (who had to be persuaded to don his

  white coat for the picture). Of the children who were to benefit from

  the lodge’s efforts, Prosper and the pale blond girl were chosen to par-

  ticipate in the event, Prosper with a tie of his father’s on and the girl in

  white with a white hair bow so huge that it seemed she might be able to

  flap it and fly away—and she looked as though she wanted to, stricken,

  eyes alert as though to danger or downcast in shame. Prosper talked to

  her. Her name was Prudence, and he laughed a little at that, mostly

  from fellow-feeling with someone else not named Joe or Nancy, but she

  only lowered her eyes again as though he’d mocked her. Still he stood

  protectively by her while the pictures were taken and the man from the

  newspapers asked their names. “Her name is Prudence. My name is

  Prosper. P-r-o-s-p-e-r. Will the picture be in the paper?”

  It was. It appeared the morning he was to go with his mother to be

  admitted, a little suitcase packed with clean skivvies and socks and a

  toothbrush and a dictionary (his mother’s choice) and some tonics and

  vegetable pills (likewise). He studied the picture with her. There he was

  with a big smile that made his mother shake her head, and Pru, her

  great eyes looking up as though out of a burrow.

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  “Don’t let it turn your head,” his mother said, and it was the last

  thing he clearly remembered her saying to him, though no doubt she

  said more than that, taking him to the hospital and getting him onto

  his white bed in the big ward and kissing him good-bye. Maybe because

  he’d never heard the phrase before, and had to puzzle out its meaning.

  Once, when months had passed, awake in the night in his plaster jacket

  immobile in that ward, he thought what she had done was to warn

  him: don’t let them turn your head. And unwittingly he had done that,

  he had let them turn his head, and all that resulted was his own fault.

  He’d imagined, for no good reason, that Pru would be given the bed next

  to his, but in fact she wasn’t even in the long room of parallel beds, she

  was in the ward below, for girls—he learned that when both their

  wards and others joined in the great sunroom for marching each morn-

  ing to a Victrola. Three mornings: he saw her each time, and spoke to

  her, and at last she smiled to see him, her only friend (so her smile

  seemed to say). Around and around they went as the oompah music

  played, stopped, and began again, some of them on crutches, others

  pushing themselves along on rolling frames or staggering rhythmless

  on legs of different lengths. Pru walked as though always in the process

  of falling over to her left, as her spine went, but she never did; she held

  her hands curled up to the breast, as though she held an invisible plumb

  line there, to see how far from true she bent, and to try and

  straighten.

  “Did you see your picture?” he asked her.

  She looked away.

  “You looked pretty,” Prosper said.

  She looked into the distance, as though searching the halting shuf-

  fling crowd for someone she knew.

  “Do you talk?” Prosper said smiling. “Cat go
t your tongue?”

  He thought the shadow of a smile crossed her face but still she

  wouldn’t speak. The music stopped, skritched, resumed.

  On the fourth morning they began to build Prosper’s cast, and there

  was no more morning marching for him.

  He had two nurses attendant on him for this, one kindly and calm,

  the other brisk and dismissive of fears; the one lean and snaggletoothed,

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  the other plump and soft-armed. They had him follow them out of the

  ward (observed by everyone) and down the hall to a bright room where

  there was a table covered in rubber sheeting and piles of other things.

  Talking, talking, first one then the other, they pulled off his nightshirt,

  which they called a johnny for some reason, and hoisted him onto the

  table to lie facedown, a little pad for his cheek, the horrid cold rubber

  under his nakedness. He knew you were not supposed to mind if nurses

  or doctors saw your posterior.

  “He’ll be a brave little fella,” said Nurse Kind.

  “He better be,” said Nurse Brisk. “This’s the easy part.”

  They had sheets of black felt and a big scissors, and cut pieces out

  and laid them on his back from neck to knees, patting and stretching

  them into place. Then they ran water at a sink and did other things he

  couldn’t see while they talked to each other about this and that, Hoover,

  the talkies, Rudolph Valentino and Rudy Vallee—for a long time Pros-

  per thought these were the same person, one the nickname of the

  other.

  “Okay dearie, this is going to get a little damp,” said Nurse Kind.

  “Move a muscle and I’ll brain you,” said Nurse Brisk, which made

  Nurse Kind laugh dismissively. Something wet and heavy was laid on

  him, at his neck, and the nurses ceased their chatter, only murmuring

  to each other as they worked the wet plaster bandages to fit him before

  they hardened. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before and the desire to

  wriggle out of it, clamber up and get out, was nearly irresistible, the

  nurses must have known it and kept their hands on his legs and head to

  keep him still while the clock on the wall ticked away.

  When they were done, they removed the hardening cast, turned him

  over and made the front the same way, right down to his groin, leaving

  a space for him to make water. The back side had a hole too, neatly

  edged in rubber. They showed it to him when it had all dried and been

  trimmed and lined with felted cloth and fitted with straps and toothed

  buckles; it was the last time he’d see the backside till it came off, long

  after.

  Laid in this cast like a turtle—the plastron part could be unbuckled

  and removed, now and then, but he was told never to get out of the

  back part—he should not even allow himself to think about getting

  out. He didn’t have to lie flat on his back, the bed itself had a crank

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  that could move it up and bring the world into view and his head in

  right relation to it, gratifying.

  In the next bed a boy was looking at him, or seemed to be looking

  at him, though his head and face were hard to assess, because he

  seemed to be in the grip of some invisible opponent he wrestled with,

  straining every muscle. He made sounds that might have been lan-

  guage.

  “Did he say something?” Prosper asked the nurse.

  “May have,” the nurse said, not looking at the fellow. “Sometimes

  he does. He’s a spastic and we don’t know what else.”

  Prosper looked over at the boy in the bed. He was definitely study-

  ing Prosper, though with what intentions or thoughts Prosper couldn’t

  tell—not dull or idiotic he was pretty sure. “Hello,” he said.

  The other seemed gratified to be greeted, and said something back.

  “Try harder, Charlie,” said the nurse, not looking at him. “Or be

  quiet. Nobody can guess what you mean.”

  Charlie rose up in his bed, as though lifting himself by puppet

  strings, and seemed ready to fling himself out, his mouth working. The

  nurse turned to him and, hand on his chest and her face close to his,

  pushed him back. “I’ve told you about this, Charlie. You lie still and be

  a good boy. It’s for your own safety. Don’t make me get the straps.”

  At this Charlie sank back and stopped talking, though he went on

  moving; if you watched you could tell that the muscles he gave orders

  to were constantly revolting or refusing, and he had to continually

  change the orders, so that he was never quite still. When the nurse had

  passed to the next bed, Charlie spoke again to Prosper.

  “Sheeez a caution. Ain she.”

  “I’ll say,” Prosper answered.

  “Oooh shth. Shthink she. Is. Muscle Eenie?”

  It wasn’t hard to understand once you listened. Prosper got it and

  laughed, and Charlie laughed too. Nurse Muscle Eenie turned to look

  back at them—like all powerful persons, she had a keen sense of when

  she was being mocked—but that only made them laugh the more.

  Prosper, spending long hours beside Charlie, got good at under-

  standing what he said, and sometimes translated what he said for the

  nurses, who seemed to have very little patience with him and to assume

  most of the time that he was muttering nonsense, and would talk back

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  to him as though he were a baby. “He’s not stupid,” he explained to

  one of the nurses as Charlie listened. “He’s just spastic. If you listen

  he’s not stupid.”

  “He’s not a spastic,” said this nurse. “He’s an athetoid. There’s a

  difference.”

  Prosper actually thought Charlie was the wittiest kid on the ward,

  his jokes all the funnier for being unexpected or hard to decode—it

  really was hard to tell when Charlie was trying to be funny, though

  Prosper got that too at last.

  The other person who understood Charlie fine was his father, who

  came often to see him, once bringing Charlie’s mother and three small

  sisters, though all these visitors were too uproarious and Nurse Muscle

  Eenie made it clear that from now on they were to come one at a time

  and not upset the routine as she said. So it was mostly his father who

  came, and sat by his bed; his presence seemed to still Charlie’s mus-

  cles, at least to lower the spasms from a boil to a simmer. It was Char-

  lie’s father who explained to Prosper that Charlie’s muscles weren’t

  weak, they just wouldn’t listen to his brain. They were plenty strong:

  in fact Charlie was here to get a couple of them released—they’d been

  holding parts of Charlie tight since he was a baby, and didn’t know

  how to let go.

  “So he’s gotta go under the knife,” said Charlie’s father smiling a

  little sadly. “Right, son?”

  “That’ll show ’em,” Charlie said. He held up his left hand, which

  curled backward toward his wrist, and made a face at it that was sup-

  posed to be tough and uncompromising.

  Prosper’s mother came too, once, though she had a great reluctance

  to come too close to where Prosper la
y in his cast; she stood a ways off,

  her hands clasped, as though the left were keeping the right from touch-

  ing anything around her. Prosper could tell she suffered, though not

  what she suffered from, and tried to ask her about life out beyond the

  hospital; he told her about Prudence and about Charlie and his mus-

  cles, but she seemed not even to want to open her mouth much and

  swallow the air in there.

  “I’m going under the knife,” Prosper said. “Any day.”

  “Oh Prosper,” she said. “Oh Prosper.”

  Soon the nurse came close: visiting hours were over, ambassadors

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  from the world beyond were to depart. Prosper’s mother kissed her

  son. The ward returned to the state it ought to have, just the children

  and their noises and cries, the circulation of the nurses, like horses in

  their sweaty hardworking domineering presence, great rumps and

  thighs beneath their white cottons or lean hard shins and the crack of

  their heels against the ward floor. They caught boys out of bed and

  heaved them back in like grain sacks, threatened and chastened and

  stilled them with a look as Miss Vinograd had done, though they were

  gentle with the ones who moved less or not at all, teaming up to move

  them from their beds to the rolling carts that took them to hydrother-

  apy or elsewhere, who knew where, and back again. On three, lift.

  Prosper’s turn at last, after the nurse had rung the curtains around

  his bed and washed him with some awful carbolic. A long black razor

  on the tray, opened, and a bowl of soapy water—they shaved his back

  and buttocks right down into the crack, why, when there wasn’t any

  hair there. Charlie’d said they would: Doan ledm slice your GNUTS

  opff, he’d cried.

  They put a mask over his face, and told him to count backward from

  ten, and that’s all he knew of that afternoon, until he knew himself to

  be back in the ward again, his head at least afloat above a body that

  seemed not to be his. Nurse Muscle Eenie told him that while he lay

  there neither in nor out of the world his mother had come to visit him.

  Charlie confirmed it—a lady came and sat and stood by him; Charlie

  tried to imitate how she had hovered, how she had wrung her hands.

  Prosper felt, when they said these things, that yes, she had been there,

  had looked down on him, but in his remembrance she’d worn a white