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Four Freedoms

Page 47

by John Crowley


  enough.

  He ordered a Cuba libre. Soon the band stopped playing and the

  singer softly and sincerely said good night.

  Late December 1944 and there are fifty B-30s on the tarmac at Ponca

  City, unable to be flown out until whatever’s wrong with their engine

  cowlings or their oil tanks or ignition processes is discovered and fixed.

  We couldn’t stop making them, for what would be done with us and all

  our skills and training, all our tools and procedures, then? So—a little

  more slowly, a little more thoroughly—we went on making them, the

  Teenie Weenies doing more standing around than before (as the Teenie

  Weenies in the comic pages are all doing most of the time while the

  active ones explore or labor). And then one more is drawn out the great

  doors to join the flock of others pointed toward the West and the enemy

  but going nowhere. When the doors open the icy fog rolls in and rises

  to the height of the ceiling above, to linger there like a lost black

  cloud.

  How cold and dark that winter of ’44–’45 was. In the North it was

  the bitterest in years; the lack of fuel oil was life threatening in some

  places, places far from Ponca City, we heard it on the radio, eyewit-

  ness. It seemed harder because for a while it looked like the war in

  Europe at least was almost over. War production was cut back and

  some items unseen since before the war began to return to the stores—

  irons, pots and pans, stoves, refrigerators. Then came the huge

  Ardennes counteroffensive and the Battle of the Bulge and the mad

  resistance in the Pacific at every atoll and beach, and the planners

  thought again. Some controls on metals and other things were reim-

  posed; new ration books were issued, and not only that: all your

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 355

  unspent ration points from ’44 were invalidated. Everybody started

  1945 with a new damn book, same old rules to follow, now maybe

  forever: that winter suspicion that the sun’s not ever going to return.

  Except now people didn’t feel so ready to sacrifice, we were tired of all

  that, so tired, and so back came Mr. Black in a big way, the stuff you

  wanted was there if you could find it, gas traded for whatever you had,

  farm-butchered beef and pork removed from the system and sold out of

  meat lockers that you knew about if you knew.

  Those who are going into the services now, boys out of high school,

  the rejects of the factories, the once but no longer deferred, know they

  will be the last: the boys mostly eager for the chance, desperate to grow

  old enough in time, others perhaps feeling differently. Now the lives of

  men killed and wounded far away seem to have been wasted, a loss

  insupportable, and more are dying now than in the frenzy of begin-

  ning—in the climb up useless Italy, in the frozen mud of the Ardennes,

  in the assaults on palm tree islands in nowhere, for nothing. It’s begin-

  ning to be possible to think so, though you’d never say it. For the first

  time, photographs of the prostrate bodies of our men are shown to us,

  on beaches, in the snow: the dead in Life. Why now? Is it a warning, a

  judgment, a caution—you see this now but you will see far worse if you

  slacken? We don’t know.

  At Van Damme Aero Ponca City a woman walks down the long

  nave of the Assembly Building with a steady tread, eyes looking neither

  left nor right. It’s Mona the mail girl, with a telegram. The edge of the

  yellow form can be seen in the front pouch of her bag. A mail girl’s

  never seen on the floor if she’s not bringing one, she never brings just

  mail, you get that at home or at the post office, they bring mail to the

  offices of the managers and bosses but not to Associates out on the

  floor. Of all the mail girls in their night blue uniforms it’s Mona who is

  always chosen to deliver the telegram: tall and phlegmatic, vast black

  pelt of hair over her brow and shoulders, black brows knitted together

  in the middle over the prow of her nose—those who watch her pass

  know these details, there have been opportunities to study her. When

  she comes through the floor, her long slow steps, a zone of silence

  moves with her, leaving a stillness in its wake even if those behind take

  up their work again, spared this time; and the silence moves on ahead,

  and spreads around her when she stops.

  356 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  “Mrs. Bunce Wrobleski?” Mona asks, drawing out the telegram.

  They know; they stop working but they don’t—most don’t, out of pity

  or to honor her privacy—look at Connie taking the flimsy form from

  Mona; Mona because she can do this task without weeping herself,

  can stand dark and silent there long enough for respect but not too

  long.

  MRS BUNCE WROBLESKI

  VAN DAMME AERO PONCA CITY OKLA=

  THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP

  REGRET THAT YOUR HUSBAND CPL BUNCE J WROBLESKI WAS

  KILLED IN ACTION 05 JAN 1945 LETTER FOLLOWS=

  JA WILLIAM THE ADJUTANT GENERAL

  Once General Marshall wrote these letters in his own hand. Now

  there are too many, too many even to count yet. Nor can the silence of

  that moment last a long time. The women around Connie (the men

  won’t come forward or can’t or don’t know how) shelter her, and help

  her to her feet from where she has sat helplessly down; and they hold

  her one by one and help her off the floor even when she says No, no, let

  me go, let me just go on, there’s so much, so much to do.

  After a time we do start up again, and the silence disperses.

  7

  Connie went back north with Andy to bring him to see his grand-

  parents, to leave him there for a while so they could have him

  with them; after a while she could come back, go on working.

  She’d got a letter telling her how to collect on Bunce’s standard

  government insurance policy, he must have told her he had one but she

  didn’t remember him doing so and she’d stared down at the letter and

  the huge amount of money feeling sick and horrified, as at some loath-

  some joke. She’d already been informed that Bunce wouldn’t be brought

  home, not now, that there were just too many to bring home; he’d be

  buried with the thousands there in the land he’d died in, it hurt her

  heart to think of it, and to think what Buster and his mom must feel.

  She had to go back, for them. So she wrapped her son in the warm

  winter clothes he’d worn when they left the North, and they boarded

  the train, the same train.

  “Good-bye, Prosper.”

  “Good-bye, Connie.”

  “I’ll see you again soon.”

  “Sure. I’ll be seeing you.”

  “Are you all right? What is it?”

  “Yes sure. Just my back.”

  358 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  “Your back hurts?”

  “My back hurts some all the time, Connie. Almost all the time.”

  “You never said.”

  “No reason to say. Get on board, Connie.”

  “God bless you, Prosper.”

  Going through the prairie and the river valleys Connie seemed to

  see
all that she couldn’t see when she had come the other way: the

  shabby towns and the weary old cars, the streets without people,

  unpainted storefronts, peeling billboards advertising things that no

  one could get or weren’t for sale. All the hurt done to this country in

  the last ten years and more, the things not repaired or replaced, still

  left undone because the war came first. The light-less factories too,

  fences rusting, gates closed with chains. Rollo had told her that thou-

  sands of businesses had failed since the war buildup began, little shops

  and bigger places too that couldn’t compete with the great names for

  the government contracts. Consolidation. More had failed than in the

  Depression.

  Gold star in a window there.

  Maybe she could see it all because of where she had been for months,

  that place all new and furiously busy. One of those that would come

  out rich.

  Night and the train filling at small stations with soldiers, different

  somehow now from the crowds of them that had played cards and

  teased her on the way down. Different in her eyes. Outside, the land so

  dark, new regulations, all places of amusement had to close at mid-

  night: no neon lights or floodlights to save power and fuel.

  Dark, rich. She tried to remember what god it was in ancient times

  who ruled over the land below the earth, which was always dark but

  rich, because he was also the god of money, of gold dug in the dark

  earth. Pluto. Plutocracy, a vocabulary word. Did she travel home

  through Pluto’s realm, money given and made, the great owners get-

  ting richer nightlong and every one else getting a little richer too,

  hoarding their money like misers and waiting? And the dead souls

  without rest among us, so many. Around her the standing men in

  their drab uniforms swayed with the train’s motion like wheat, so

  quiet in the dark. Some of them, she hoped, some at least were going

  home.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 359

  That spring we watched in the newsreels the gleaming B-29 Superfor-

  tresses, long and slim and impossibly wide-winged like the Pax but

  coming smartly off the assembly lines of four different factories in

  working order and already winging over the Pacific. They could reach

  Tokyo now, as the B-30 was intended to do from bases in China; but

  those bases had never materialized, and the B-29s took off from the

  little islands of the Pacific, Saipan, Tinian. In March they were sent in

  a great fleet in the night to fly in low and drop not great blockbuster

  bombs but hundreds of thousands of little canisters of jellied gasoline.

  Tokyo they always said was a Paper City. Before the war, girls collected

  Japanese dolls with paper fans and paper umbrellas and paper chrysan-

  themums for their hair; the dolls were accompanied by little books

  about Japan and the paper houses and cities. In the newsreels we’d seen

  the jellied gasoline tested, an instant spread of white fire and black

  smoke, each canister making a disaster. The crowded city burned so

  hotly that the Superfortresses were tossed high up into the air above it

  by the rising heat, like ash above a bonfire. Later in the newsreels

  Tokyo was a gray checkerboard of streets, nothing more; no buildings,

  no people.

  In April in Oklahoma, the lilacs purple and white bloomed along

  the little river where Prosper and Diane had watched the lights of the

  refinery in Pancho’s Zephyr. In the middle of the first shift at the plant

  the loudspeaker announcer, whose inadequate and uncertain voice

  we’d all come to love and mock, came on unexpectedly.

  “Attention attention. In a few moments the president of Van Damme

  Aero, Mr. Henry Van Damme, will be speaking to you, bringing you

  an important announcement. At this time please shut down machines

  and tools in Bulletin A5 sequence. Crane operators please secure lifted

  parts.”

  Silence, or at least quiet, passed over the buildings, the whine of

  machines going down, the ceaseless clangor ceasing.

  “Mr. Van Damme will speak to you now.”

  There was a moment of silence, a slight rustle of papers, and Henry

  Van Damme began to speak, his voice oddly high and light, at least

  over this system. Most of us had never heard it before.

  360 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Van Damme Aero Associates. My office

  received a cable two hours ago announcing that President Franklin

  Roosevelt died suddenly last night.”

  Of course he couldn’t hear us where he was, but he was wise enough

  to know he must pause then and wait. There was a noise of dropped

  tools, a woman’s piercing cry, and a mist of expelled sound. There was

  weeping. A voice here and there raised in blessing or hopeless denial or

  distress.

  “I knew Franklin Roosevelt,” Henry said, and his light voice grew

  lighter. “I know that he would want us not to mourn but to look for-

  ward. The work is not done. And yet.” Here came the sound of more

  papers shuffled, or perhaps a handkerchief used, and then Henry Van

  Damme began speaking again in a different voice, it was hard to say

  different in what way, but we lifted our heads.

  “Oh captain my captain,” he said. Then for a moment he didn’t go

  on. “Oh captain my captain, our fearful trip is done. The ship has

  weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won.”

  Of course we knew the words, many of us, most of us. It was a verse

  we had by heart, one we’d spoken on Oration Day or standing at our

  desks while teachers tapped the rhythms. Oh heart heart heart. A few

  people spoke softly along with Henry Van Damme, as though it were a

  prayer.

  “The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and

  done;

  From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

  Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

  But I, with mournful tread,

  Walk the deck my Captain lies,

  Fallen cold and dead.”

  The strange thing is that all through that April night there were

  rumors across the country of the deaths of other men, names we all

  knew, all of them found to be alive the next day. There was a closed

  sign on Jack Dempsey’s restaurant in New York City: surely Dempsey

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 361

  was dead. Jack Benny had died suddenly. Almost a thousand calls came

  into the New York Times asking about the stories. Babe Ruth was

  dead. Charlie Chaplin. Frank Sinatra. The rumors fled as fast as long-

  distance calls across the country. As though we thought our king and

  pharaoh, gone to the other side, needed a phalanx of great ones to con-

  duct him on his way.

  Henry Van Damme flew back that day to the Coast to talk with his

  brother and the relevant officers of Van Damme Aero about reducing

  costs on the Pax program as well as larger plans for the postwar world.

  As of that moment no industry fulfilling war contracts was permitted

  to begin conversion to peacetime production, since that would give an

  unfair advantage over others in similar case, but it had to be antici-
/>
  pated; they were all like yachts backing and tacking at the start line,

  eager to go. This miraculous over-the-rainbow collaboration between

  the military and industry was about to end—why would it continue?—

  and first across the line would be first into the new world. Competition

  though wasn’t what it had been prewar, as we were already learning to

  say. It seemed more and more likely that Van Damme Aero itself would

  undergo dissolution into one of the even huger consolidated aircraft

  firms now in the process of forming like thunderheads out of rising

  plumes of heated air. Whether Henry and Julius would come out atop

  whatever entity would be born from that, or would remain somehow

  within the shell of the older company to fill out their days, was not at

  all clear. Henry Van Damme was so tired and sick at heart now that he

  began to believe he didn’t care.

  “It’s necessary to begin now to reduce the workforce on the pro-

  gram, in fact throughout all the programs, including the A-21 and

  others that are still fulfilling orders, so that we don’t release a tide of

  unemployed just as war work ends and peacetime retooling hasn’t

  begun.” That was the VP for labor, whose resemblance to the common

  figure of Death and Taxes with scythe and dark cowl had just become

  apparent to Henry. “The goal is to retain the skilled workforce. Unions

  are helping here; the Management-Labor Policy Committee we’ve had

  to set up has done a fine job of getting cooperation on all kinds of labor

  issues, the turnovers, the absenteeism, reconversion issues. So far.

  Unions will be willing to let go last-hired men, men with poor records,

  older men new to the union, and particularly women. Well they only

  362 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  ever admitted as many women as they had to anyway, and those few’ve

  got little seniority. Of course the women will largely want to quit as

  soon as peace comes, maybe before, not just because they’ll be glad to

  get back to the home but because they’ll see that their husbands and all

  the other young men being demobilized will need those jobs.”

  He turned a leaf of his report—that item dealt with—on to the next.

  “The handicaps will want to go home too, where they can be taken

  care of. They made a fine effort, many of them, but the limited tasks

  they were able to do can be redistributed now. It looks pretty certain

 

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