Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  would happen either. The first place the yellow stripe led to was a long

  room with a paper sign on the door that said Induction. Inside were a

  number of booths and stations labeled with arrows to show you how

  to proceed. At Requisition she handed in her card from the govern-

  ment employment agency but had to go through the same information

  again, with variations, as the clerk filled in things without lifting his

  eyes; he handed her forms and asked, still not looking up, if she had

  any questions, and after a moment of being unable to produce a

  thought of any kind she said no. Then at the next station she had to

  show her birth certificate, and here it is, with two infant footprints,

  but it’s the wrong thing—this is a hospital notice of live birth and not

  a legal birth certificate like the others have, an engrossed document

  with seals. The clerk shrugged wearily. Connie thought of offering her

  grown-up feet for comparison, but the clerk just handed it back to her

  without looking up and pointed the way to the next booth. She folded

  up the little feet. The Clock Clerk (that’s who the sign said the next

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  person was) gave her an employee number and a time card and told

  her how to use it. Her starting rate of pay was fifty cents an hour for

  base-rate production and a bonus prorated on work done above the

  base. Any questions? Connie said no. Probably it would all be obvious

  what to do and how to do it if she actually started. Behind her the line

  of new employees shuffled forward. She had her fingerprints taken, by

  a man who grasped her fingers and thumbs like tools, pressed them

  firmly on the somehow loathsome leaking purple pad and rolled them

  expertly onto the spaces on a paper form. Her employee number was

  written on the top. Herself and none other. She was photographed,

  asked curtly to take off her hat, no time to check her hair or choose an

  expression. Bunce had looked in his photograph like John Garfield in

  a picture they’d post outside a theater, he always looked splendid in

  pictures. Next she and a group of others were read the Espionage Act

  at a mile a minute. By Order of the President of the United States.

  Connie had already decided that she would figure out some way to tell

  them she couldn’t do this, she’d made a mistake and couldn’t come

  back, she was sorry sorry sorry. She would write a letter maybe. But

  meanwhile there was no way to turn back, she could only follow the

  yellow band with the others pressing behind her; she went down a

  strange-smelling hall to Physical Examinations. Just looking in at the

  door into the room, where screens had been set up to roughly divide

  the men from the women, she felt shamed and exposed and wondered

  why she’d ever thought she was brave enough to do this. What you

  imagine something is going to be like before you jump into it is never

  what it will be, it’s just the feeling you have at the time, made into a

  picture, like that picture of the three women looking into the sky and

  the future.

  She had a chest X-ray, the remarkably ugly and bewigged nurse

  pushing Connie into place before the glass of the machine and pulling

  her arms back, as though she meant to handcuff her; then she took

  Connie’s blood pressure and murmured through a list of questions so

  fast Connie hardly had time to think of an answer. The nurse did the

  things they always did at physicals without explanation, learning facts

  they wouldn’t or didn’t have time to divulge. Nothing so bad as to keep

  her from working here: her form was stamped and the stamp signed

  across by the nurse, who capped her pen and was eyeing the next in

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  line even as she handed the sheet to Connie to add to the others she had

  been given.

  After that she was herded into a group cut out from the mass of

  applicants and sent with them into a room full of benches, where they

  were each seated before a big square magnifying glass in a frame. A tin

  box of tiny gears was under the glass. A man at the center of the room

  in a gray cloth coat waited till they were all seated, then started talking

  loudly and distinctly, telling them what they were to do. It was a

  Manual Dexterity and Visual Acuity Test. You were to Pick Up a Single

  Pinion with Thumb and Forefinger. Turn the Pinion Clockwise between

  the Two Fingers. Look to See if the Teeth of the Pinion are All of the

  Same Width. When you have Assessed the Pinion, place it either in the

  Left Box, Accepted, or the Right Box, Rejected. Work as Fast and

  Accurately as you Can. You have Five Minutes. He lifted his finger,

  pressed a button on the big watch he held, and said Begin. Just then a

  woman next to Connie piped up: Were the airplanes really going to use

  these little things if we-all accept them? The man smiled and laughed

  and said Goodness no, it was just a test, there were good ones and bad

  ones in the box and you just try to tell which are which, and everybody

  laughed a little and he raised his finger again and said Begin.

  Connie picked up one of the little things with thumb and forefinger.

  It took a moment to adjust her vision to the hugely enlarged fingertips

  she saw, their uncared-for nails, she’d meant to give herself a manicure,

  and the toothed wheel; she moved it back and forth until it came clear.

  But as soon as it did she saw that one of the teeth was wider, or had a

  slight burr or something on it. She put it in the right box, and picked

  up another. Around her she was aware of the voices of the other appli-

  cants, complaining or marveling at the task, laughing when they

  dropped or fumbled the pinions, but almost immediately all the noise

  sank away and she picked up the pinions one after another; for a

  moment she doubted herself—would she really see a difference, and

  was it a big enough difference? But she felt the differences so dis-

  tinctly—she always knew when she saw one—that she decided just to

  trust herself. Before the five minutes were up she had emptied her box,

  sorted left and right, and the man glanced up from his watch at her

  doubtfully or with a little smile that seemed to say Oh you think so?

  Then he said Stop. They were each to leave the proper form (pink) next

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  to their work, which would be returned to them later. Then they were

  sent out a farther door as another group came in behind.

  It was time for lunch.

  She wasn’t the only one whose husband had worked here, though almost

  all the ones who spoke up said their husbands had been drafted or

  joined up, and that was the reason they applied. One said her husband

  would kill her if he found out. She needed the money, she said, and

  when no one responded to that, shrugged one shoulder and went back

  to her sandwich. Connie wanted to ask her more, since she had no idea

  what Bunce would think about her taking a job, though whenever she

  thought about telling him, or him finding out, a kind of dread came up

  under her heart. But he’d have to understand. He was a good man;

&
nbsp; everybody who knew him said so. And when that dread arose there

  was Adolph too, as in one of those dreams where you leave your child

  for a minute to do something, and that leads to something else, and

  you remember the kid finally but by then the whole world’s changed

  and there’s no way to get back to him.

  She was thinking those things when her shoulder was touched, and

  she leapt slightly—it was easy to startle her, Bunce liked that about her,

  and was pleased that he knew it. The man behind her, stepping back at

  her response, was the one in the gray cloth coat who had given them

  the Manual Dexterity and Visual Acuity Test.

  “Mind if I see your card?” he said.

  She stood, picked up the pile of colored papers small and large she’d

  been collecting all day, and began looking through them. The man saw

  what he wanted and neatly two-fingered it out of the pile, looked at it

  back and front. “Mrs. Constance Wrobleski.” He compared the card

  to the pink sheet he had.

  “Yes.” She had a sudden thought that he had discerned she wanted

  to get out without signing up for a job, and was here to send her home.

  No, how dumb.

  “I wanted to ask,” he said. “Have you ever done any work like this

  before? I mean like the little job you did there?” He pointed his head in

  the direction of the test room.

  “Um no,” Connie said.

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  “I don’t mean a job, but for instance anything like retouching

  photos, or similar?”

  Connie said nothing, not even sure what that was. She was getting

  a little restive at having to answer No to questions about what she

  could do or had done.

  “Ever do fine needlework?”

  “No. Never.”

  The man looked again at the sheet in his hand. “Well, I must say

  you have remarkable visual acuity. You scored near a hundred percent

  on that task. And you did it in near record time.”

  He looked up now and gave her a big smile, as though he had been

  conscious all along that he was being unsettling but that the joke was

  over. “Really?” she said.

  “Yes.” He grinned more broadly. “You surprise yourself?”

  “Well I don’t know. I mean I didn’t think.”

  “All right, well listen now. We’d here like to encourage you to come

  and take another test or so. We think somebody like you could be of

  some real service. The tests’ll take an hour or so, not more.”

  Connie regarded him in amazement, and said nothing.

  “It might mean a better pay rate,” the man said, as though in confi-

  dence.

  “Okay,” Connie said.

  “You finished up your lunch?”

  She looked back at the deflated bag, and at the women at the table,

  who had all turned to her, like the faces of girls at school when one of

  them was called out by a nun for some special purpose: was it good or

  bad? Good for them, bad for her? Or the opposite? “All done,” Connie

  said. The man motioned to her place at the table, and Connie first

  thought he meant she ought to pick up her leavings, then saw he wanted

  her to take her coat and follow him, and she did.

  Her revised pay rate would be sixty cents an hour, a sum she kept mul-

  tiplying all the way home in various combinations, by the day, the

  minute, the week, the month. Above that base rate she would get a half

  a cent more for every ten pieces completed, and the man who put her

  through her tests (which included loading tiny ball bearings into a

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  wheel, moving through a series of meaningless tasks in the most effi-

  cient way, reading eye charts through elaborate goggles) said she was

  sure to do well with that, and in not too long a time she would be

  moving up into Quality Control and make just a little more, if she

  chose to stay, which he hoped she would—nodding at her in an affir-

  mative way that made it hard for her to resist nodding back. She was

  amazed to find she was good at something she’d never known about

  before, not good at a task or good at sticking to it or any of those

  qualities, but good at it in herself, in her being, her body: eyes and fin-

  gers and senses. She tried to remember instances where she had used

  those abilities without noticing them, in homemaking class, in making

  birthday cards or Spiritual Bouquets, finding lost things, picking up

  pins, but nothing struck her. Hand-Eye Coordination. That was the

  talent really, plus the Visual Acuity. She had excellent visual acuity. She

  said it out loud as she went up the hill under the viaduct toward her

  street: excellent visual acuity. She looked steadily and intently to where

  her own house was just then coming into view, and by somehow not

  straining but relaxing—not pointing her vision toward the place but

  opening her eyes to receive the incoming pictures—she could clearly

  see someone standing on the porch. It was the woman in the top apart-

  ment of the right-hand house, a long-armed bony square-jawed woman

  named Mrs. Freundlich. She had lived there with her grown son, who

  for some reason had not been drafted for a long time; maybe he was

  too fat, though that didn’t seem to keep others out. When he finally did

  get his notice and went away the mother was left; she seemed never to

  come out of her apartment, and Connie would have felt sorry for her,

  except that she seemed to forbid sympathy. She was standing on the

  steps of the building, hands under her apron, a coat over it, seeming

  lost in thought, maybe waiting for someone (the mailman?). Connie,

  exalted somehow by her day at the Bull plant, waved and smiled at the

  woman as she came closer, and got an idea at the same moment. It was

  only a matter of thinking how to put it.

  “How is your son, Mrs. Freundlich? How is he doing?”

  “Got a postal card t’other day,” the woman said, leaving it at that.

  “Does that leave you a lot of time?” Connie asked. “Him not being

  here, I mean?” A look of incomprehension grew across the old lady’s

  face, and Connie hurried on. She got through the basic proposal, and

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  said that she’d be making good money at the plant and could pay what-

  ever Mrs. Freundlich thought was fair, to all of which Mrs. Freundlich

  listened without response, when she suddenly said, “Does he mind?”

  Connie tried out a couple of possible meanings for this and then

  said “Oh sure. Yes. He’s a good boy.”

  “I won’t have him if he won’t mind.”

  Connie almost told her to go talk to Adolph’s grandmother, who

  was upstairs with him right now, but instead she just let the idea sink

  in a little; and after a strange silent moment Mrs. Freundlich seemed to

  collect herself and began to ask sensible questions and offer arrange-

  ments and even praised Connie brusquely for doing war work.

  So that was done. What a piece of luck. Adolph would be right in

  the building, and her mother could go home. And Connie Wrobleski,

  without husband or child, would spend all day doing what? Something

  she h
ad never done before. The world was no longer the same as it was:

  everyone said so.

  2

  For all the talk about her visual acuity and all that, the job Connie

  was given without explanation or apology was running a huge

  electric welder that formed U-shaped pieces of steel into frame

  parts, and mostly involved turning it on and off at the right times.

  She fed in the half-circle of steel, along with a steel cylinder, which was

  the sleeve for a driving pinion (that’s what she was told it was), shut the

  machine door, and threw a switch to turn on the juice. At intervals she

  had to press big buttons to govern the process, but the machine had a

  revolving guard that prevented her pressing any but the right one at the

  right instant; as long as she could move her arm she couldn’t go wrong.

  It seemed amazing, fearsome, to her, but the engineer who taught her

  about it treated it like it was an antique, a buggy, a cider press, smack-

  ing it with his hand now and then and talking to it or about it, Come

  on old horse, aw now don’t go doing that, y’old rattletrap. When it

  seized up for one reason or another he had to come back, de couple the

  power cords, open the side panels, and do things she couldn’t under-

  stand while she stood arms crossed nearby trying to look ready to help.

  Why was he so angry? She felt she had descended into another kind of

  world, where everything had grown huge, or she had grown small.

  Noises here were vast: there was a continuous ringing of metal, a sledge

  dropped onto steel flooring plates made a noise huger than she had

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  known was possible just from somebody dropping something. The

  power cords that the annoyed engineer coupled and decoupled from

  the rank of outlets on the wall were thicker than her arm, the couplings

  like buckets, things unrelated to lamp cords or plugs or the twisted

  wires of electric fans—when he signaled her to pull the start-up switch

  again, the power seemed to hit the machine with a ringing blow,

  making it shudder.

  The whole place was also dirty and messy, which surprised her.

  Piles of stuff in process covered with dust and overlaid with other stuff,

  as though somebody had bought the wrong things and just left them

  sitting. There was something wrong here: some people, like her super-

  visor, worked constantly, and others seemed not to work at all, they