Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  man, the best kind. But now. It’s got to be the way it is.”

  Prosper, looking up at her, thought for a horrified moment that he

  might weep, for the first time since childhood. “Is that what he said? Is

  that what he said to you, Vi, something like that? Is that the thing

  you’re supposed to say?”

  The door opened then, tentatively, at the same time as the person

  entering knocked on it. A dark blonde, large-mouthed and large-eyed,

  older than Vi and a bit stringy, but Prosper responded, his Sixth Sense

  alerted, which made the whole thing worse, as he wanted to say to Vi

  but could think of no reason to.

  “This is Shirley,” Vi said.

  Shirley lifted a tentative hand to Prosper, not sure how welcome she

  was but smiling.

  “Hi, come on in. Sorry I can’t, you know.”

  She waved him still, talking with her hands, to Vi too, whose shoul-

  der she patted.

  “So you two,” Prosper said, still uncertain of his self-control.

  “Going off to, to wherever it is. Where the buffalo roam.”

  “Yep,” said Vi. “Back in the saddle again.”

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  “Yep,” Shirley said. “Rockin’ to and fro.”

  They both laughed.

  “The war’s not over, you know, Vi,” Prosper said, with something

  like reproach. “There’s more to do.”

  “Oh sure,” Vi said. “Yes. Well I’m going back into the cattle busi-

  ness. Those boys in the service will soon be eating my meat.”

  She leaned over him, and Shirley politely stepped back. “We’ve got

  to go,” she said. “I’ll write. We’ll meet again.” She leaned to kiss his

  cheek, and at the same time her hand slipped under the sheet and into

  the wide slit in his pajamas. She gave him a squeeze, gentle and firm.

  “So long, big fella,” she said but looking at Prosper’s eyes. “Keep your-

  self busy.”

  She was gone, he could hear her laughter and Shirley’s as the door

  closed behind them.

  He’d never felt so sorry for himself in his life.

  He ought to be able to get up and pursue her, not let her go, and

  here he was stuck. He thought of scrambling into that damn chair and

  racing out the door, but there were two steps there he’d never get over,

  and if he did he’d never be able to get back in. Cry after her.

  Sad Sack.

  He still felt the squeeze she’d given him; and, as though it did too,

  his organ swelled. What he and Vi had done, no more of that now, all

  those things. He reached beneath the sheet as she had done, she for the

  last time. His bandaged hand useless even for this, he had to swap it to

  his left; tears now at last running one after the other toward his ears as

  he lay, his soft sorry sobs and the other sound mixing.

  There was a knock on the door, which Vi had left ajar. Startled, he

  struggled to tuck himself away.

  “Hi?” A woman’s voice. Not Vi.

  “Yes!” he cried.

  Connie Wrobleski in white shorts and tennis shoes opened the door.

  She had a covered dish in her hands, her face was stricken with some

  wild feeling that looked to him like grief or maybe guilt, and her little

  boy peeped through her bare legs at him.

  6

  Vi Harbison thought it was odd how her heartbreak, like Prosper’s,

  had started at the movies. Like the preachers used to say: Satan’s

  machine for ruining young girls.

  The theater in her town had closed in the bad years and only

  opened again when times got a little better; Vi graduated from high

  school that summer, aiming to go on to normal school—she’d got a

  scholarship. The theater was called the Odeon, and Vi knew why; she

  explained the name to the new manager, the day he came to take the

  padlock and chain off the double doors, and Vi happened to be pass-

  ing: she watched him insert the key into the lock and turn it, and the

  fat gray thing fall in two in his hands. He was new in town.

  “Odeon,” she’d said. “It’s Greek for ‘a place for performances.’ ”

  “Well you’re pretty bright,” he said. She couldn’t judge his age—not

  old, unburned and unlined, but maybe that came from making a living

  in the dark: his eyes wide and soft, not like the men of this place,

  around here even the boys’ eyes were always narrowed by the sun, cor-

  ners puckered in crow’s-feet. What made her speak to him that way,

  offer her bit of knowledge, she didn’t know. He reached into the pocket

  of his pants and took out a handful of free passes.

  “Bring all your friends,” he said, giving them to her.

  “I don’t have this many,” she said.

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  He laughed and with a forefinger pushed back his white hat. “You

  can use them all yourself,” he said. “A year’s worth of pictures.”

  She was there with her father and brothers the night it opened, every-

  one glad, they’d not known how much they’d missed it. A rootin’ tootin’

  shoot-em-up, they delighted in it, laughing appreciatively at the unreal

  lives of movie cowboys. He’d got the place swept of its wind-driven dust

  and the broken chairs repaired and the chandelier rewired, but it was the

  same place, nothing much, just a hick-town picture show. She wanted to

  know why someone like him would want to come to this town that she

  only wanted to leave, and she thought that finding the answer to that

  was why she came in the middle of the day when almost nobody else did,

  when he ran the picture for her alone—that’s what he said, selling her a

  ticket, then immediately ripping it in half and giving her the stub, which

  seemed unnecessary till he explained that those stubs he kept were how

  the distributors of the picture calculated how much he’d make at every

  showing. That two bits of yours has a nickel in it for me, he said.

  Sometimes he’d come down from up where the picture was pro-

  jected through a glass window, a cone of dusty shifting heaven-light,

  and sit beside her, still wearing his hat; he’d feed her Milk Duds and

  speak softly to her about the picture, tall pale women bantering with

  clever men, their jokes meaning more than one thing, spoken in a way

  that wasn’t like anyone spoke anywhere, speech as finely made as their

  shimmering dresses.

  “You could learn a lot from her,” he whispered. “She could teach

  you a lot. Smart as you are.”

  Teach her what? She tried to soften and silken her voice, speak in

  those pear-shaped tones, say what shouldn’t be said in a way that could

  be: and when she did it well—not blushing even—he’d smile at her in

  the same way that the dark-eyed male actors smiled down at their

  clever girls: as though he’d learned more than she’d said.

  Because she was still a gangly half-made girl with bitten nails whose

  father ran a failing farm supply store, whose best friends were her

  brothers. He knew very well what she didn’t know.

  He lived at the hotel, paying his rent every day, a dollar a day, as

  though he’d not want to pay in advance for a room he might not have a

  use for. He had a bed in his li
ttle office at the theater too, a daybed he

  called it, a davenport she said, which made him laugh.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 271

  Daybed. Bed for day. Her mother told her that men only want one

  thing, that they are like beasts without thought or consideration; at the

  same time she told Vi that someday one would come who was good

  and kind and thoughtful and would love and care for her forever. The

  two things canceled out and left her with no counsel. The high school

  boys now headed out to farms and ranches or out of town hadn’t much

  interested her, she’d moved among them as through a shoal of fish that

  parted to let her pass and then regrouped behind her. She was taller

  than most of them and played ball better. She liked their horses more

  than she liked them. She had no way of knowing if this man was like

  other men, if he had no consideration, or was good and thoughtful, she

  only knew she could make no objection to him, not even when he

  paused to see if she would: she could think of no reason to. He was

  more like a land she’d come into than someone to know or judge. She

  had no way to go back, but she didn’t think of that: he told her not to,

  not to think about the future. It was the one thing he forbade. Anyway

  this country she’d come into was her too: she just hadn’t known it could

  be so.

  He told her he was sorry he couldn’t take her to nice places or on

  moonlight drives, squire her around as she deserved, but he figured

  those brothers of hers wouldn’t cotton to that, and she said he was

  right, they wouldn’t; it was only because she’d started at the normal

  school on the hill that her time was her own now and none of their

  business. She didn’t care: inside the picture palace (that’s what he called

  it in his double way of speaking) they were alone with the moviegoers.

  He brought her up into the little insulated booth where the great rat-

  tling projectors burned away, hot as stoves, two of them because when

  the film on one ran out he turned on the other, where the next reel was

  already loaded and strung up, and seamlessly the picture changed from

  one to the other. He brought her to the little double-glass window in

  the wall where the picture could be watched, and showed her the marks

  that appear for an instant in the corner of the screen, that warned him

  the reels would need to be changed in five minutes, in three, in ten sec-

  onds, now: and she realized she’d seen those X s and dots forever, and

  not understood them. Once, as she stood there to look out, he came

  behind her, drew up her skirt and gently eased down her pants, she

  lifted a leg so he could slip them off. She held herself against the padded

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  wall, legs wide apart for him to enter, still watching through the

  window the great silvery faces come and go; sometimes the actors

  looked her way, speaking as though to her, troubled or threatening or

  surprised by joy, but without words, for she could hear nothing they

  said, could hear nothing at all but the uncaring projectors, and the

  people out there looking at the screen couldn’t hear the sounds he and

  she made either: she knew they couldn’t, and still she tried to be quiet

  as he rose up within her beyond what she’d thought possible. Five min-

  utes till done, three minutes, ten seconds, now.

  When winter came her mother began to worsen from whatever it

  was that she had, that ate her away from within. Her father could

  hardly speak of it; her brothers tried to go on acting in the same ways

  they had always done, belligerent or jaunty or uncaring, intent on their

  jobs or their games or their pecking order, and Vi could understand—it

  seemed not to be in them to rise to this, which didn’t mean they weren’t

  hurt inside: only she couldn’t talk to them. She had only her man in the

  movie theater to talk to. He listened, too: calm and quiet and unafraid.

  Until (she could tell it) he could go no further. She knew she shouldn’t

  hand him something he couldn’t fix. She felt she cost him something

  just by being so hurt by it, so confused and hurt, herself: she had made

  herself less his, less what he wanted, she subtracted from herself some

  quality or value he deserved to have. Ever after she’d have to tell herself

  it wasn’t for that reason—not for that reason alone, not mostly, not at

  all—that he’d moved away.

  In the center of the proscenium of the old theater were plaster leaves

  and flowers surrounding two masks, one of them with wide mouth

  turned down in a frozen rictus of awful grief, the other in an even

  worse contortion of awful laughter. No picture showing: it was the

  middle of the morning but as eternally dark as ever here, the dim house

  lights on. He told her he was leaving town, selling up, heading out. The

  way he said it was more gentle but not otherwise so different from the

  way he’d say anything, any jaunt he’d propose, any scheme to make it

  big or see the world. She sat in the seat beside him in the grip of an

  awful fear, that there was a right thing she might say, one thing, that

  would make him retract what he’d told her and change him back into

  what he had been just before, but she didn’t know what that right thing

  was and wouldn’t ever know it.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 273

  “Why?” she said at last: the one word, one syllable, that she could

  manage without tears. She looked straight ahead.

  “Couple of reasons,” he said. “There’s some gentlemen who’ve

  learned about my little enterprise here, people I knew a long time ago;

  they’d like to have a talk with me and I don’t believe I want to start up

  that old acquaintance.”

  That was language from the movies. She had to believe it contained

  a truth about him. She thought of saying he could hide out at the ranch:

  but that was just more movie talk. She didn’t know who he was: never

  had.

  “And,” he said. “Well, just time to move on. Never been happy long

  in one place.” He turned to look at her, she could sense it but wouldn’t

  turn herself. “Hadn’t been for you, I’d have been gone a while ago.”

  She had to go, she had snatched these moments from her mother

  and her family, she’d told them lies that weren’t going to last long, she

  had to leave and go out into the day. She got up and pushed past him

  like a moviegoer when the picture’s reached the place where she came

  in. There was no one in the hot street or in the store, she could weep

  and cry aloud in an agony that was like (she’d learned the word in

  music class at the school) a descant on the cry of grief always in her

  then for her mother and herself.

  When her mother was dead and buried, though, and he was still

  intent on leaving and had announced the closing of the theater, she

  made a spectacle of herself; she was seen banging on his door in the

  hotel and people talked and she ran from the house and her brothers

  knew where she was headed and followed her, pulling at her arms as

  though she were ten years old and in a tantrum, a madness possessing
<
br />   her that she would deny possessed her. She’d deny even to herself that

  she had to see him and then find herself looking up at the lighted

  window of his office at midnight not knowing how she’d got there. Her

  mother not a month in her grave.

  She was waiting there loitering the day he came down from the

  office with a stack of file folders and a tin money-box that he put into

  that cream and gray convertible he had, and a small pistol too in a hol-

  ster, belt wrapped around it, which he put in the glove compartment.

  Two alligator suitcases, a little shabby, were already in there. She could

  say nothing, a clear coldness all through her worse than the fiery obliv-

  274 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  ion. He nodded to her as though she were a dim acquaintance he had

  nothing against. When she didn’t respond in any way, he held up the

  files to her.

  “Like to invest in a picture palace? Steady income.”

  “Stop it,” she said. “You stop it. I’ll never go to the pictures again.”

  “Oh honey. You will. You’ll see. Plenty of good pictures, always more

  in fact, brand-new, all-talking all-singing all-dancing. You’ll see.”

  Everything he owned was in the car. He had to pass her to get to the

  driver’s seat, and as he did he seemed to convince himself of some-

  thing, and he turned back and took her and kissed her and touched

  her. Then he got in the car and started it. She could hear the gears

  engage and it moved away, leaving tracks in the dust of the road, not

  seeming to grow any smaller though as it went.

  Three years passed.

  The train blew its whistle for a grade crossing, and Shirley in the

  coach seat opposite hers awoke for a moment. “Hey,” she said, and

  went back to sleep. Shirley’d been married and divorced, Vi didn’t yet

  know the whole tale. Outside the train window the landscape was

  growing more familiar. Vi hadn’t told Shirley about the picture show.

  It hadn’t ever reopened.

  She’d said to Prosper Olander that you can only get your heart

  broken once. She thought of it as like a horse’s broken leg: after that

  they shoot you. Whatever you are afterward isn’t as alive; you can’t be

  burned, but you don’t feel the fire. She’d said to Prosper that the woman

  who’d left him at the stairs to the train had broken his heart, as hers

  had been broken; but something about him made her think differently.