by John Crowley
Don’t stop they’d say, an urgent whisper, or a cold command; a
warning or plea, bashful or imperious.
Don’t stop Vi said to him in Henryville, and amid her yearning
thrashing struggle toward what she wanted to reach. Prosper had to
work not to be thrown off and uncoupled, like a caboose at the end of
a train making too much steam on a twisty roadbed, whipsnaked and
banging the track. All that kept him connected and at work was her
hands in his hair and his on her flexing haunches. Until up ahead some
kind of derailment began, unstoppable: first the crying plunging engine
escaped, gone wild and askew, and then one by one the cars, piling
happily into one another, then all into stillness, silence, seethe.
Oh they said after a time softly, oh: and Um and Haw. Ho, he said, huho.
7
War and the sex urge go together,” Pancho Notzing said.
“Is that so,” Prosper inquired.
He and Pancho and Vi, with Sal Mass on Al’s lap in the
back, had taken the car down to the Wentz Pool on the west
side of town, a famous amenity built by another of Ponca City’s brief
flaring of oil millionaires. It had just opened for the season. Pancho
took a stately dip in an ancient bathing costume that drew almost as
much attention as Al and Sal in theirs. Now Prosper watched Vi Har-
bison stretch out on a chaise, face up into the sun.
“It is certainly so,” Pancho said. He had draped a towel around his
throat and was performing a series of physical-culture exercises that
didn’t seem to inhibit his speaking one bit. “I know it from the last
war. The Girl Problem.”
“Soldiers and girls.” Prosper knew that Pancho had three nieces, a
great trial to him, restless and wild, entranced with men in uniform,
khaki-wacky as the term was. At least they’d not be rounded up and
treated as criminals and sinners like the poor girls of the last war, for
which Pancho was grateful. Still he worried.
“It’s the men themselves who are the problem,” he said. “If there is
a problem.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 177
“Well sure,” Prosper said. “If you think maybe you won’t be alive
next month or next spring. Sure.”
“Not only that, not only that,” Pancho said. He ceased his Macfad-
den program. “A lot of the women in the plant, in that town, they’ve
nothing to fear—they aren’t facing death on the battlefield. But I guar-
antee there’s no end of intrigue going on there. Married or not.”
“You think so?”
“I’m sure so.”
Prosper didn’t tell him that this week Anna Bandanna was issuing a
subtle warning about VD—“Keep clean for that man who’s far away.”
Not that he thought Pancho was being censorious. Intrigue, by which
he meant something like hanky-panky, was a Passion that needed to be
met, like any other. In the Harmonious City there would be young
women in every job, doing every task their passional nature suited
them to. Old and young, working alongside men, many different men
in the course of a day. Intrigue. Women who were Butterflies, in Pan-
cho’s terminology, and never settled on a partner; others with more
than one man for whom they cared deeply; others with but one lover
for life. Pancho thought a woman who could and would bring happi-
ness to dozens or hundreds of men did a wrong to herself as well as to
those dozens if she kept herself for only one.
“I’d agree,” said Prosper. “I believe I would.”
“Not necessarily in the present instance, though?” Pancho lifted his
chin in the direction of Vi, who just then rolled onto her stomach. Vi
was an object lesson of the general principle that Pancho’d stated, in
answer to a question of Prosper’s about Vi, a question actually not
meant to be answered ( Isn’t she something? ). Vi’s own bathing suit
was the modern kind, made of a fabric Pancho could name, whose
price he knew: a fabric that clung and stretched remarkably.
“Well. I don’t have a jealous nature, Pancho. It’s a thing I’ve learned
about myself.”
“And when did you learn this? It’s an important insight.”
Prosper was still in shirt and pants. He couldn’t swim, and since he
couldn’t, he chose not to disrobe, though Vi’d urged him try it out,
take a paddle, she’d help. “It wouldn’t do me a lot of good,” he said.
“Making claims on someone.”
178 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Ah.” Pancho sat, regarded the hot blue sky. The uproar of children
and youngsters stirring the pool like a seething pot was pleasant. “I
think I see what you mean. In a sense you don’t have the standing.”
Prosper thought about that, wondering if it was what he’d meant.
Not have the standing. Did Pancho mean that he couldn’t be expected
to fight, so his claim could be ignored? Say if he went up against a
fellow like Larry the shop steward, though he couldn’t imagine himself
and Larry at odds over a woman. Well maybe in such a circumstance
he wouldn’t fight and maybe for the reasons Pancho’d think, and maybe
not. He lit a cigarette, the match’s flame too pale to see. At the pool’s
edge, Sal and Al were doing a shuffle-off-to-Buffalo from their old act
as the crowd cheered.
“I’m a lover not a fighter,” Prosper said.
When the draft began in 1940 Prosper was twenty-one; though his
uncles (and his aunts too) said there was no call for it, Prosper went
downtown to present himself to the Selective Service board to be regis-
tered with all the other men aged twenty-one to thirty-five, a huge mob
of them as it happened, milling around the doors of city hall, laughing
or patient or annoyed at the imposition. More than one looked Prosper
over in some amalgam of expression that combined contempt and
amusement and maybe even envy (he’d safely sit out any war), though
Prosper looked away from such faces before he could really decide
what attitude they put forth. A couple of young men, definitely amused,
gave him a lift up the stairs, each holding an elbow, and set him down
within, and when it was his turn at the long table where harried men
filled out forms, those two and others waited to see what disposition
would be made of him.
“Polio?” the man he had come up before asked.
“No,” said Prosper. “Something different.”
“Tabes dorsalis?”
“Um,” said Prosper. “I can’t tell you in a word.”
“Permanent condition?”
“Seems so.”
The man had no business asking these questions anyway, he was
just curious, registering for the draft wasn’t determinative of your
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 179
status—the men had to explain that over and over, your draft status
would only be determined when you were called for a physical. Prosper
took his registration card (not the sort of document he’d made for the
Sabine Free State, too crude and inelegant) and went away hearing
laughter, not necessarily unkind, the same laughter that we laughed
after the s
ecretary of war picked the first draft numbers out of a huge
glass bowl and the President read them out on the radio, and it was
learned that the second number he read belonged to “a one-armed
Negro banjo-picker,” a sure iv-F man like Prosper.
Through that year and the next Prosper worked for the uncles and
for Bea and May, and went to the tavern and the pictures and the ball
game when he could, and polished his commercial art and studio skills;
and now and then, rarely but not never, in circumstances that always
seemed new and not like any of the others before, he’d get a Yes to his
question. He came to think that George Bill’s client hadn’t actually just
walked up to any pretty woman he saw and lifted his hat: he must have
had some sort of Sixth Sense (Bea’s name for how we perceive what we
should be unable to perceive) as to how his proposal might be taken.
Prosper kept working on his own Sixth Sense, with instructions taken
out of The Sunny Side for envisioning a desired state of affairs and
believing in your deep perceptions, and also with information he drew
out of True Story. He made some atrocious mistakes, painful for him
and her—horror and affront suffusing her face as he tried to retreat in
confusion—but no one actually smacked him; maybe his crutches acted
as eyeglasses did or were supposed to do, and kept at least the honorable
ones from lashing out. He was a masher, one girl cried at him: And you
think anybody’d look twice at YOU? He had refutations for both these
charges but he didn’t make them, because his rule was never to pursue or
pester anyone who turned him down, which is what a masher did.
Anyway he mostly didn’t approach women in the street, partly
because he wasn’t in the street himself that much, partly because he’d
have had a hard time catching up with them: a woman in the street
with a cripple in pursuit might have all kinds of thoughts but they
weren’t likely to be favorable. Those women who responded favorably,
or at least smiled indulgently, he’d usually known for a time before put-
ting his question; and it was likely (this never rose by itself into his
consciousness, but he would see it was likely when at length Pancho
180 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
and then Vi pointed it out to him) that the women who said Yes had
already decided on Yes well before there was anything to say Yes to:
maybe even before Prosper decided to ask.
“It’s the one thing women can’t do,” Vi explained to him by the
now-empty pool, its water soft and still as evening came. “They can
answer, but they can’t ask.” She’d donned dark glasses; he thought she
looked like a star.
“But you asked,” he said.
“Shut up,” said Vi.
The danger he’d seen—the danger he felt himself always in those
days to be in—wasn’t that he’d get turned down; it was that he might
see something in one, suddenly, in a moment, something small and
seemingly inconsequential—nothing more than the moist glitter in an
eye corner, a momentary look of wild uncertainty, the tender hollow of
a neck—that would cause him to commit entirely to one pursuit, never
look back. He thought it could; he felt the tug once a week, once a day
in some weeks, but (it was like robbery, and yet like relief too) those
women didn’t remain as he first perceived them: they shifted into some-
thing or someone else as quickly as they had taken hold of him, or they
didn’t stand still for the hook to set, they moved on and away, and (he
supposed) maybe always would, his life flitting away with them around
that corner, up in that elevator, into that shop. What he expected in
fear (he thought of it as fear) didn’t actually happen until he met Elaine
again, after the war started.
We wouldn’t always remember, later on, how many of us didn’t
expect a big war, how little we wanted one, how we felt we owed nobody
anything on that score. President Roosevelt wanted to get us into it, we
thought, but he wanted us to do a lot of things: he sometimes seemed
like a wonderful fighting dad we wanted to please but didn’t always
want to mind. He wanted us to care about the displaced persons in for-
eign lands. He wanted us to give our dimes to charity to help him stop
infantile paralysis too, and we did if we could, poor man.
“It is glorious to have one’s birthday associated with a work like
this,” he told us over the radio in that big warm voice. “One touch of
nature makes the whole world kin.”
“What’s that mean?” Fred asked. He and Prosper stood at the bar,
looking upward at the big varnished box—Prosper wondered why
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 181
people do that, stare at a radio from which somebody’s speaking. It
was the night of the President’s Birthday Ball, 1941, and a lot of dance
bands were playing for a lot of city big shots and socialites who’d given
money for infantile paralysis. There were balls all around the country,
the excited announcer said, and the President was speaking to all of
them over a special national hookup.
“In sending a dime,” the President said, “and in dancing that others
may walk, we the people are striking a powerful blow in defense of
American freedom and human decency.”
In those days you let talk like that go by without thinking very
much about it, everything was a blow for freedom, but Prosper said,
“Hear that? You gotta dance, so I can walk.”
“Sure,” Mert said. “Rex here’ll dance. Come on, Rex.”
Mert had adopted a little dog, one of the eager lean big-eyed kind
with clicking toenails at the end of his breakable-looking legs (that’s
how Prosper felt about him). Mert was teaching him tricks. He lifted
Rex up by his front paws and they danced to “I’m in the Mood for
Love” like a hippo with a weasel.
“Keep it up,” Fred called out. “No effect so far.”
“We,” said the President. “We believe in and insist on the right of
the helpless, the right of the weak, and the right of the crippled every-
where to play their part in life—and survive.”
Prosper (who’d not get a cent from those dimes, they were for the
polios alone, though his uncles believed he could probably pass for one
at need) stood propped at the bar, listening some to the President,
laughing some at Rex, mostly considering his drink and waiting, for
nothing and everything, and feeling in danger of getting the blues. The
next time he heard the President speak he was telling us that the Japa-
nese Empire had attacked Hawaii, so like it or not, whether we were
for it or not, we were at war. That’s what Prosper, without knowing it,
had been awaiting, everything and nothing: and yet for him, for a long
while, just as many things remained the same as changed.
“So take a look at this,” Mert said. From within his jacket he extracted
a folded paper wallet, its cover decorated with a rampant eagle astride
a stars-and-stripes shield or badge. The badge shape was one Prosper
182 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
<
br /> loved to look at and create. gas ration book it said, and on the other
side (the recto Prosper knew to call it) it said drive under 35! and
compliments of your local texaco service station. From within
this folder, Mert drew out a little pamphlet printed in red. Another
badge shape urged the bearer to buy war bonds. It was his gasoline
ration stamp book, an A, the lowest rating—four gallons a week now,
probably not even that much in the months and years to come.
“Okay,” Prosper said.
“Here’s the question,” Mert said. “With the stuff around here—the
stuff we got for you, your own stuff, the stuff, the Ditto machine there,
the inks—would it be possible—theoretically—to make one of these?”
“Make the B or the C,” Fred put in. “Twice the gas.”
Prosper eyed the thing, felt the paper, studied the letters and type.
He knew the rule, that you couldn’t use the stamps without the book—
stamps torn from the book were invalid. You’d have to make the whole
book.
“Don’t worry about that,” Mert said. “We can make just the stamps,
sell them to the gas stations. The gas stations sell them to the custom-
ers, then take ’em right back and give ’em the gas, and turn in the
stamps to the government.”
“Easy as pie,” said Fred.
“The book’s a different matter,” Mert said. “If we can make the
whole book we can sell it and clean up. Cut out the middle man.”
Prosper was still holding the book. punishments as high as ten
years’ imprisonment or $10,000 fine or both may be imposed
by united states statutes for the violation thereof.
“I can get twenty bucks a book,” Mert said.
“But you shouldn’t,” Prosper said, not knowing he would till he did.
“It won’t be many,” Mert said. “A few.”
“There’s a war on,” Prosper said. “It’s not right.”
“Listen,” Mert said. He took hold of Prosper’s shoulders. “Here’s
the real skinny, all right? There’s plenty of gas in Texas. We ain’t going
to run out. You know why they ration it? So people don’t use their
tires. It’s the rubber they don’t have. The Japs got all the rubber now.
See? Don’t give people gas, they can’t use their tires, they don’t waste
rubber. See?”
“It’s a good idea,” Fred said. “The stamps. The books too. It’ll work.”