Four Freedoms

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.”