Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  of pogo stick. He took a step toward the boy, who smiled but retreated.

  “Hello little fella,” he said. The boy’s mother looked down at him,

  as though just then discovering him there. “What’s your name?”

  The kid didn’t answer, and Mom seemed not to want to volunteer

  one. “His daddy’s working out there, at the plant,” she said, still

  regarding the boy, as though it was he who needed the information.

  She was a rose-gold blonde, one of those whose skin seems to have

  taken its shade from her hair, her brows fading almost into invisibility

  against it. For a second they stood looking, her at the boy, the boy

  wide-eyed at Prosper, Prosper at her.

  “Was he coming out to meet you?”

  “No,” she said. “He doesn’t know we’ve come.”

  “Oh. Aha. Surprise visit?”

  “Well.”

  “What shop’s he work in? Does he live in Henryville?”

  “Where’s that?” she asked in something like despair, as though sud-

  denly envisioning more journeying. She looked all in.

  “Just the town around the plant. The new houses. Do you have an

  address?”

  She didn’t answer, as though to let him guess she knew nothing at

  all and would have no answer to any further question. She watched

  Prosper shift his weight. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you . . .”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Listen. If you’re going out to find him, you

  could come with me. My friend’s got a car. There’s room for you two.

  We work out there, maybe we can give you some help finding him.”

  “Oh gosh. Oh that’s so nice.”

  “This way,” he said, and took a few steps under their gaze, the kid

  still smiling, interested. “Or no wait. You’d have to lug the bags.

  Sorry.”

  “No, oh no it’s fine,” she said, reaching for what looked like a one-

  ton strapped leather suitcase.

  206 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  “No wait here,” Prosper said. “I’m to meet him right around the

  corner. Wait here and I’ll go get him and we’ll drive around. Okay?

  Just wait here.”

  He had just turned to set off when a wheezy beebeep behind him

  turned him back. Pancho pulled up to the curb, himself beeped at by

  the affronted cab behind. Prosper guided his new finds to the car with

  one hand. “How’s that for luck,” he said. Pancho pulled the brake and

  leapt out to help with the bag, and got the mother and child stowed in

  the backseat. Prosper went around and performed his get-in-the-car

  act, talking away. “So how far you two come? Where’d you start out

  from?”

  She named the place, Prosper astonished to hear the name of his

  own northern city. They had to compare neighborhoods then, families,

  schools, finding no connection.

  Pancho leaned over the seat, proffered his hand and gave his name,

  and Prosper’s.

  “Constance,” she said in reply. “Connie. This my son Adolph.”

  “Well,” Pancho said, as if in commendation. “Well let’s get going.”

  “This is a good thing,” Prosper said, grinning proudly as the car

  rolled off. “This is a very good thing.”

  Within minutes they were outside the town and in utter darkness, stars

  scattered overhead. Connie Wrobleski tasted something thick and

  sweetish in the air they moved through. Crude oil, said the little man at

  the wheel: you’ll get used to it. He pointed a thumb back toward where

  they’d come from, and Connie saw the far-off glitter of lights and a

  flare like a titanic match burning. It had turned to warm spring, nearly

  summer, as she’d gone south; she opened her coat. The crippled man

  smiled back at her as though glad for her. And then—Connie at first

  thought it was dawn rising, though it couldn’t be that late—the great

  glow of the Pax plant and hangars put out the western stars.

  Three days before she’d set out with these bags and Adolph, nearly

  two years old, her good suit on but flats because she knew what lay

  ahead. She couldn’t face the Elevated with the bags and Adolph, and

  her purse felt heavy with money from the war job she’d had, so she

  called a cab.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 207

  “Leaving home?” the taxi driver said, loading the bags in the

  trunk—greasy Mediterranean type Connie had always mistrusted—

  and in a sudden rush of careless energy she said “None of your busi-

  ness,” smiled, and slammed the door with a satisfying thud; and they

  went to the station in silence.

  The station was packed, like the first day of a giveaway at the

  department store, Connie had known it would be, the newspaper was

  full of stories, people in motion. The noise of all of them as she came in

  holding Adolph’s hand seemed to rise up toward the ceiling and rain

  back down on them, the voices, the announcements over the loud-

  speakers, the click of heels. The station was a new one, built only a few

  years ago by the WPA; over the doors were stern blocky stone eagles,

  and above the row of ticket windows where people patient or impatient

  worked out their trips or made demands or pleas, there ran a broad

  paneled painting, the history of the city and the region done in forms

  of travel: Indians with those things they drag, not trapezes, and pig-

  tailed men with oxcarts, larky boatmen on canal boats, a stagecoach

  and an old puffer-belly locomotive, all of it pressed up together in the

  picture as though it had happened all at once, as crowded with con-

  trary people pushing and tugging as the station below it. Around her as

  she moved slowly forward men were working the line, offering Pull-

  man tickets to the South, where Connie was headed; they were asking

  ten or twenty dollars above the standard price for these tickets, which

  were (they said) all sold out at the window. Everybody wanted to go

  south now, old people to Florida, women to the training camps where

  their men were stationed. Right by the ticket window as Connie reached

  it was a sign that said is this trip necessary? in stark black letters.

  Like an old aunt or nun, the government making sure you weren’t

  doing anything just for fun, and she wasn’t, if the government were to

  ask her she could say Yes this trip is necessary.

  “Ponca City, Oklahoma,” she said, or cried aloud in the din. “Coach

  class. Myself and a baby, is all. One way.”

  PART THREE

  1

  The week after Christmas Bunce Wrobleski came home from the

  Bull aircraft plant with newspapers that were full of ads for

  workers with skills like his—ads for workers of any kind, actu-

  ally, columns and columns of them after the deserts of last

  decade’s employment pages, jobs in this city and jobs far away. Situa-

  tions Available. Bunce wanted a new situation. Well, that was pretty

  obvious. He stood in the lamplight at midnight (couldn’t even get off

  Swing Shift at this damn plant, he’d said), a Lucky dangling from his

  plump sweet lower lip, his collar turned up and his cap still on at a

  rakish angle with its bill sharply curled, its buttons on it—his union

  button
, Blue Team button, plant admission button with his picture on

  it wearing the same cap the button was pinned to; and Connie’d

  thought, What a beautiful man, as she never could help thinking,

  despite that foxy or wolfish cunning that was sometimes in his lashy

  eyes, as it was then. He pulled off the cap and tossed it and tousled his

  thick hair. The job listing he had shown her was in an aircraft plant

  miles away.

  The rule now was that if a man quit his war-work job to go look for

  something better, or if he took some job that wasn’t war work, then his

  deferment could end, even fathers wouldn’t be exempt for long. Basi-

  cally he was tied to his job. That was the rule. He was the same as a

  212 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  soldier, in a way; no different. At the kitchen table he had laid it out for

  Connie, moving the salt and pepper shakers and the ashtray gently

  around the oilcloth in relation to one another, as though they were the

  elements of the contract he had accepted. Constance watched his

  broken-nailed hands as he explained. His eyes weren’t meeting hers.

  The salt and pepper shakers were little bisque figures of a hen and a

  rooster; the rooster was the pepper.

  But—Bunce explained, moving away the ashtray, opening a path

  for the rooster across the flowery field of the oilcloth—but if you could

  locate a different job in some other war industry plant, a job that was

  rated higher than the one you had, and you had the qualifications for

  it, then you could quit the one and be in no danger from the draft if

  you went and took the other. The job he had here was no good. He

  could do better.

  “You know why I got stuck here,” he said, and only now did he

  raise his eyes to Connie—she being the other piece of the rebus, she

  and Adolph asleep in the next room. Sure she knew, and she wasn’t

  going to look down or away from him. He could have used a safe that

  night in the back of the Plymouth and they wouldn’t be stuck, but then

  there’d be no Adolph either, and she wasn’t going to think that would

  be a good thing.

  For a time after Bunce went across the country to the new job, a

  kind of stasis settled over her; it was like waiting for him to get home

  from the shift but it went on all day long, and was there at night when

  Adolph woke her, the sensation of Bunce not there and nothing to do

  or to be until he came in, which he wasn’t going to do. She was careful

  to keep herself up, for no one. She put on her makeup and a pair of the

  nylons that Bunce had bought from a guy who suddenly had a lot of

  pairs. She went to the hairdresser and with a ration stamp got her

  bangs curled high on her head and the length in back curled too like

  the bottom of a waterfall striking its pool. She did all that and at the

  same time felt a strange temptation, a yen or tug, not to do it, to stop

  altogether and live in the house and the bed the way Adolph did, with-

  out caring or thinking.

  For a few weeks the postal orders came regularly from Bunce, for

  different amounts, sometimes more, sometimes less. Then a week went

  by without one: it was like the sudden stopping of her heart, when it

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 213

  takes that gulp of nothing, then rolls over somehow and starts again,

  thumping hard and fast for a moment as though to catch up. Just that

  same way a postal order came the next week, bigger than ever. But

  then weeks started to pass without them.

  She wrote a postcard to Bunce at the last address she had for him

  and heard nothing for a while; then a letter came, with some bills

  folded small and tucked into the small sheets, a five, two tens, some

  ones.

  Honey I’m sorry I didn’t send more lately but you can’t believe

  how expensive it is out here Food costs more and every cheap

  diner charges fifty cents for a plate of stew The rents are worse

  when you can even get a place I was rooming with some fellows

  and we got into a wrangle I’m sorry to say and I had to leave I

  am doing all right now but they aren’t going to forward mail if

  you wrote any, they never do from rooming houses. I hope to

  come home for a while soon with any luck but you know how

  the trains are. Kiss my boy for me.

  So that was the rent for the month plus the five she was shy for last

  month, and some food money, which wasn’t so cheap here either in

  spite of all the controls they talked about. The next three weeks went

  by with nothing from Bunce.

  Connie Wrobleski was twenty years old and hadn’t ever faced the

  prospect of nothing, no support, no surrounding provider. Kids she

  knew at school had to drop out because their fathers lost their jobs, but

  she hadn’t worried because her father was a bus driver for the city and

  the union was good. Not even finding out she was pregnant had felt

  like facing nothing, because Bunce (after he had banged on the steering

  wheel of the Plymouth so long and hard she thought it would break,

  making a noise behind his clenched teeth like a bad dog) promised her

  it was okay and he’d never leave her, he wasn’t that kind of guy. And

  anyway so many of the girls in her class at Holy Name were in the

  same condition by the night of the Senior Ball, some of them showing

  already and proudly wearing their rings even though the Father Super-

  intendent said they were forbidden to—well if all of them were in the

  same boat, and if Bunce was going to be good and already had a good

  214 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  job, then it felt more like the good scary beginning of something larger

  than she had ever known, something that would just go on and on and

  show her what it was as it happened, like that scene in movies where

  at the start you fly over hills and down roads and up to a house in a

  town and through a door that opens as you come to it and into the

  kitchen where a family is in the middle of their lives. This, though—

  the drying up of those letters, the little flight of them failing—this felt

  like having and knowing nothing at all. Adolph looked up at her and

  she down into the huge pools of his eyes, and he was sure of more than

  she was.

  Late on the last Saturday of the month—suddenly remembering

  the task with a grip to her heart—Connie got Adolph wrapped in the

  red-and-white woolens and cap her mother had knitted for him, and

  lifted him into the huge blue-black baby carriage for which he was

  already too big, and from which he seemed likely to fling himself out

  like a movie gangster from a speeding sedan. She walked the carriage

  backward down the steep steps before her house (Adolph laughing at

  every bump). The house was a double one, each half the mirror image

  of the other, to which it was joined like a Siamese twin, two apart-

  ments per house. She turned rightward up the street. Leftward went

  down under the viaduct and past the millworkers’ houses and the coal

  and ice dealer’s to where you caught a bus that went along the train

  yards out to where the Bull plant was, the great brick buildings marked

  wi
th big numbers, Number 3 where Bunce had worked. Rightward

  the street went up for a while, the heavy carriage bouncing sedately

  over the seams in the sidewalk, past the blackened and forbidding

  Methodist church and then down, past the IGA and into a neighbor-

  hood of single houses, to cross the avenue where the brown-brick

  grammar school stood on its pillow of earth. On this day the ration

  books for the month were given out there. You went around back,

  where in the playground kids were dangling from the jungle gym wait-

  ing for their mothers; Connie could feel their cold skinned knees and

  barked knuckles—Bunce always said that imagining pain and discom-

  fort was worse for her than the real thing when it came, which it

  almost never did.

  She went in the back door to the strangeness of an empty echoey

  school smelling of kids and old lunches, to the cafeteria where the volun-

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 215

  teers were handing out booklets and checking names. Most of the volun-

  teers were teachers at the school, and since Connie didn’t have a child at

  the school they didn’t know her. She carried Adolph in her arms, he was

  scared to get down and walk, and of course all the women wanted a

  look at him and smiled and asked Connie what his name was.

  “Adolph?” said a man behind her in line. “There’s a heck of a name

  to lay on a kid.”

  “It’s his grandfather’s name,” Connie said, looking straight ahead,

  thinking maybe that made it worse.

  “Is he a German?”

  “It’s a fine name,” said the woman behind the scarred table. A

  wooden box filled with stamp books was beside her.

  “It was a fine name a couple of years ago,” Connie said. “When he

  got it.”

  “Well sure. Like Adolphe Menjou.” Connie handed her the ragged

  and empty remains of the old book—you couldn’t get a new one with-

  out handing in the old—and was given her book of rough gray paper

  and a sheet of printed reminders and notices for the month, which she

  would sit down later and try to master.

  At the door where the people who had been given their books went

  out, a man in a sleeveless sweater and a bedraggled bow tie stood by a

  folding table. A sandwich board was open beside it. It showed four

  women’s faces in profile, almost identical but receding into the dis-