Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  that Social Security will soon be expanded to pay a lifetime disability

  payment to those people and they’ll basically retire from the work-

  force. They’ll not be our issue.”

  He began to describe other matters, colored and other marginal

  workers, recovering investments in housing provided at cost or on gov-

  ernment loans; Henry Van Damme wasn’t listening closely, though (as

  always) he’d find he remembered it all when he needed to know it.

  “Henry,” said Julius.

  “Jet engines,” said Henry. “One on each wing, underslung. It could

  give enough power to get the thing off the ground faster. Less strain on

  the other engines, less overheating. It’s possible. Just a further modifi-

  cation.”

  Julius regarded his brother, the smart daring brother, the one who

  always made the wild right guess about what to do next. “The Army

  Air Force,” he said, “is thinking of going with Boeing on that, Henry.

  Boeing’s got a bomber in plan with about the specs of the Pax but with

  all jet engines. Our spies have just informed us. They’ve numbered it

  XB-52. The military’s prepared to commit to it. I can give you the

  details.”

  “Well that’s so wrong,” Henry said, and pressed a hand to his heart.

  “That is just so wrong.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Pancho said to Prosper.

  Larry the shop steward had that day asked Pancho with a grin about

  Pancho’s pink slip, knowing even before Pancho’d opened his pay enve-

  lope that he would find one, because (Larry didn’t quite say it but

  everyone was free to assume) as shop steward and an associate member

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 363

  of the Labor-Management Policy Committee, he’d been personally

  responsible for its being put there. It was white, not pink, but it was

  what it was. Getting rid of the deadwood, Larry said to his circle of

  grinners and nodders. There’s still a war to win here. Prosper had over-

  heard.

  “What’s that mean?” Prosper now asked. “Doesn’t matter?”

  “I have, as the saying goes, other fish to fry,” Pancho replied. He

  and Prosper walked the aisles of the Kroger in search of the makings of

  a dinner, which took a lot of time when shoppers were as judgmental

  as Pancho and as slow-moving as Prosper. “Understand, I came here

  chiefly for reasons other than permanent employment. I intended to

  refine some ideas I’ve had through observation of a new kind of prac-

  tice.” He lifted a potato from a bin and studied its face. “I’ve made

  scores of notes.”

  “Well I don’t know where you’ll get work now,” Prosper said.

  “I should tell you, dear friend, that I’ve long been in communica-

  tion with many people around the nation. Around the world in fact.

  An inner core of associates as well. My ideas may seem to you to have

  come out of my own little coco, but in fact they have been tried and

  changed in argument and disputation. Anyway, these associates—I

  keep them abreast of my thinking, and they do their best to bring to

  fruition those plans I have long laid.”

  “Really.” Prosper had seen him carrying his many envelopes to the

  branch post office in the plant, licking stamps, asking for special deliv-

  ery on this or that. He’d thought it no business of his. He looked into

  the green porcelain meat case, checked his book of stamps.

  “Now after many false starts it seems that matters are, coinciden-

  tally, coming to a head. I’m informed that a man of great wealth has

  expressed interest. Real interest. Wants to meet us, talk about these

  things.” He leaned close to Prosper as though he might be overheard.

  “Oil money.” He took up his search again amid the vegetables. “Of

  course not even the greatest magnate, the most repentant profiteer,

  could by himself pay for the establishing of even one Harmonious City.

  However much the world is in need of its example right now. No. But

  now perhaps a real start might be made.”

  “I thought this place, Van Damme Aero, was a kind of place you

  had in mind.”

  364 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  “An illusion,” Pancho said with calm certitude. “I’m through with

  that.”

  “So you’re going to meet this man? The oil man?”

  Pancho said nothing, as though Prosper was to infer that it must be so.

  Prosper had a hard time imagining these associates of Pancho’s. He

  thought of the icehouse gang, of the Invisible Agent and his controllers.

  He thought that he, Prosper, was perhaps considered one of them in

  Pancho’s mind.

  They approached the counters, where a dull-faced woman awaited

  them at the imposing cash register to add up their purchases. Just there,

  crates of oranges stood, the first seen in a good while around here,

  things were getting better. While Pancho laid down their selections,

  Prosper studied the bright paper labels of the crates, which showed

  over and over a hacienda at sunset; primroses and cactus; a huge pot

  with zigzag stripe; and, holding in each hand a golden globe dropped

  from the rows of green trees beyond that led to purple mountains, a

  senorita just as golden. And he thought he’d heard about this place

  before. Hadn’t Pancho spoken to him of it, as though from his own

  experience, that day they’d met beside the gas-less Zephyr? Yes just this

  place, where Prosper had thought to go and Pancho claimed to have

  gone, but maybe not. Well anyone could want to be there, now; surely

  anyone could believe, anyone who’d been long on the road and done

  poorly, that such a place existed, and could be reached.

  “No matter,” he heard Pancho say, to no one. “No matter.”

  April was over when Diane walked out of the house in the Heights for the

  first time since coming home from the hospital with Danny Jr. (her

  son’s name till Danny agreed or insisted on something else, his letters

  had grown ever shorter and rarer as time went on). Danny Jr. had been

  born premature, small as a skinned rabbit and as red and withered-

  looking as one too, but the doctor said he was fine and he’d fatten up

  fine. And his back seemed straight so far: she couldn’t bring herself to

  ask the doctor if he’d seen anything that was, well, and so she’d believe

  it was fine too, and stroked his tiny back and tried to guess. She’d

  insisted on the hospital, first in her family to be born in one, just

  because. It’s healthful, Mamí, and I’ve got the money.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 365

  That day she’d told her mother she just needed to be in motion, and

  while the baby slept she’d just walk down toward the shore, make her

  legs work, walk without that ten-pound bag of rice she felt she’d been

  carrying forever. As she went gently downward past buildings and

  streets she’d known since childhood she began to see, there below her,

  people who were coming out of their houses; coming out, rushing out,

  and embracing others who were also rushing into the street. She kept

  on. More people were coming out now from the houses around her,

  excited, elated, frant
ic even. She heard bells rung, church bells. Sirens.

  More people in the street, hugging and cheering and lifting children in

  their arms, men kissing women. Girls rode on the shoulders of men,

  some in uniforms. In a moment she was surrounded, people taking her

  arms as they took others, the whole lot of them seeming about to fly up

  into the air in a group.

  What was it? What was going on? She had to listen to them till she

  understood.

  The war was over in Europe. It was on the radio. The Russians had

  taken Berlin, and the Germans had given up. They said Hitler was

  dead. It was over, over.

  A fat man gave her a kiss on the cheek, a fat woman embraced her

  and she embraced the woman back, and they all went spinning and

  spiraling down the streets toward the ocean crying out that it was over.

  Some of them dropped out and went to sit and weep.

  Over. It was so bright and sunny. Of course it wasn’t over, not for

  Danny and not for her, but still it was over, and you could let your

  heart go for a moment to rise up among all the others, and you could

  link arms with strangers and laugh and smile.

  8

  Prosper Olander got his own white pink slip in an envelope stuffed

  with bills and coins, a week’s severance pay, which wasn’t owed

  to him under contract but given anyway. To him it would always

  seem—well, symbolic, or appropriate, or suggestive of the shape

  of time, or something—that his own employment should end on VE

  Day, and later memorials and celebrations of that date would fill him

  with a strange unease he couldn’t quite explain to himself, as though

  he should no longer exist. He thought at that time that Upp ’n’ Adam

  were going to be out of a job too, and so was Anna Bandanna, and

  where they went he would now go, wherever that might be.

  For a time he went nowhere, living in Pancho’s house on Z Street

  waiting for bills he couldn’t pay to show up in his mailbox. Van Damme

  Aero and the union had information about unemployment insurance,

  which somehow Prosper feared to apply for; maybe it’d be discovered

  he should never have been employed in the first place.

  Mostly nothing arrived in that brass box at the Van Damme post

  office, to which he had a tiny brass key. He had his monthly letter from

  Bea, saying among other things that his uncles had got in trouble for

  dealing in forged ration stamps, which didn’t surprise Bea any. She

  didn’t think they’d go to jail, but it was dreadful that someone in your

  own family, no matter how distant, could do such a thing.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 367

  (It was true: Bill and Eddy, attorneys, had a struggle getting the

  boys off lightly. Without Prosper their wares had grown cheaper and

  less professional, and they’d taken to pressing loose stamps on gas sta-

  tions, who would then sell extra gas to special customers at a profit

  and turn in the fake stamps for it. Not every pump jockey thought this

  was a good idea, and the boys had started threatening some of them—

  their scheme was turning into a racket—until one plump little miss in

  billed cap and leather bow tie on the South Side of the city took the

  stamps with a smile and then turned them in to the authorities. Where’d

  she get the nerve? Mert and Fred also hadn’t known that by now the

  paper used for the real government stamp books was specially treated,

  and if dipped in a chlorine solution would turn a pretty blue, and their

  paper didn’t. George Bill put in evidence Mert’s spotless record in the

  last war, and Fred pleaded he’d only got into the game to provide for

  his crippled nephew.)

  The same mail that brought Bea’s letter brought another envelope,

  the stationery of a hotel in a town in an adjacent state. Prosper thought

  he recognized the old-fashioned hand that had addressed it. Inside the

  envelope was a postal money order for four hundred dollars, and a

  letter.

  Well, Prosper, I write to let you know what’s become of me and

  of my plans, and also to ask of you a favor in memory of all the

  time we’ve spent together. Well it turns out that the group that I

  was to meet here and make some plans with weren’t able, or

  weren’t willing, to assemble. Not all or many of them anyway.

  And frankly the ones who did come were not the ones I would

  have relied on. I just can’t work with that kind of material,

  Prosper, their good hearts and intentions (if any) aside. I have

  sent them all away.

  Moreover, the big backer I was led to believe would be

  coming here to meet me and look over the plans for the Harmo-

  nious City, which I have had printed at some expense, he has

  declined to show up, having I suppose some more important or

  practical projects to interest himself in. To tell the truth he is not

  the first person to hold out before me a mirage of support with

  big promises that fade away like morning dew. I have never let

  368 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  disappointments like that touch me. I suspect that like the others

  he merely wanted to build a “Shangri-la” of his own atop my

  solid foundation, which would thus have failed even if he could

  have understood the thinking behind it. So there’s an end to

  that.

  I may appear to you embittered, and perhaps I am at least

  finally disillusioned, and being as old as I am and no longer

  employed or employable I find myself unable and more impor-

  tantly unwilling to rise up off the floor once again. I have there-

  fore determined on ending my life by my own hand rather than

  letting incompetence, ill-health, and poverty have their way

  with me. I have paid for a further week at this lodging, after

  which they will find I have no more to give them nor any use for

  their hospitality.

  What I would ask of you, dear friend, is that in the next

  days you will come here to this town, where you would not

  want otherwise to journey I’m sure, and collect my remains,

  both my own poor person and more importantly the papers

  and plans to which with painful care I have devoted so many

  years, not to enrich or aggrandize myself, no, but for the

  increase of human happiness. What though I have failed? The

  plans, the philosophy of Attraction and Harmony, these

  remain, and if there is any hope and any justice in this

  wondrous world we inhabit, they will lie like seeds through

  winter upon winter, to be watered and nourished and grow in

  the end.

  Well enough of all that, just get here if you can, I’ll probably

  be on ice at the morgue on my way to the potter’s field, but if

  you get here in time they won’t throw me out. The enclosed for

  whatever expenses a simple burial might entail, the rest for your

  good self.

  You know it’s a funny thing how a plan of suicide simplifies

  your life. No reason any longer to pay the rent, answer your

  mail, wash, dress, even to eat. It’s a strange relief to know that

  you’ve had to make a choice between ham and eggs and flap-

  jacks for the last time in y
our life. But I maunder, my friend,

  and it is now time to bid you farewell in this life, and to ask

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 369

  your pardon for these obligations I have laid upon you. If you

  don’t fulfill them I will be none the wiser, of course, but here’s

  hoping.

  It was signed “Pancho,” and on another sheet of the same statio-

  nery was a note headed To Whom It May Concern, that granted to

  Prosper Olander the power to take possession of all his effects and

  make such disposition of his remains as he deems appropriate, and this

  note was signed Pelagius Johann Notzing, BA, Esq., and was dated

  three days before.

  “What the hell,” he said aloud. “What the hell.”

  Sal Mass was there trying to open her box, standing on tiptoe with

  her key to reach it, she’d tried to get a lower one but was told they had

  to be assigned in alphabetical order. “What is it?” she asked.

  Prosper held out the letter to her and watched as she read it. After

  frowning over the first sentences she suddenly gasped, and clutched the

  letter to her bosom as though to hush its voice, looking at Prosper in

  horror. He gestured that she read on. When she was all done she looked

  up again, a different face now.

  “That god damn son of a bitch,” she said.

  Prosper knew who she meant: not Pancho.

  Almost as though they’d instantly had the same idea, or communi-

  cated it to each other by Wings of Thought as the ads in The Sunny

  Side said, Prosper and Sal together went out of the post office and

  toward the Community Center where, unless the sun had stopped

  going east to west, Larry would at this time of day be found in the

  games room playing pool and jawing.

  He was there. He saw Prosper and Sal approaching him and took

  the damp unlit cigar from his mouth, grinning appreciatively. “Well if

  it isn’t,” he said, but then Prosper had reached him and thrust Pancho’s

  letter on him.

  “Read this,” he said.

  Larry looked it over. “It’s not addressed to me.”

  “Just read it.”

  They watched him read, the game suspended, Sal with her fists on

  her hips.

  “Oh jeez,” Larry said. “Oh for cripe’s sake.”

  370 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  “You oughta,” Sal said, “you oughta,” but couldn’t think what he

  oughta, and stopped.