jobs onto the least senior men. She didn’t say that, because he’d tell
Mother and Mother didn’t need to be more alarmed than she already
was or more certain that Martha should come back home and go work
with the USO. She wrote him funny stories and amazing stories and
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 347
stories that were both, about being sent down to the Great Dismal
Swamp, yes that’s its name, to learn how to pull targets for antiaircraft
gunners to train on, gunners who missed and hit the tow planes every
now and then. She told him about the male pilot who was assigned to
fly with a woman pilot and stormed in to his commander and said he
was quitting if he had to fly with women, and tore off his wings and
threw them down on the commander’s desk; the commander said I’ll
tell you when you’re quitting, pick up those wings and report for duty.
So maybe that story wasn’t true, anyway Martha didn’t know it was
true and the one or two male commanding officers she’d had anything
to do with were as patronizing and horrid as any pilot, but it was the
right story anyway. She told Norman how you used “Code X” on your
orders to mean you couldn’t fly because you had your monthlies, or “a
limited physical disability” as they said. She quoted him the silly songs
they sang: The moral of this story, girls, as you can plainly see, Is
never trust a pilot an inch above your knee— but she didn’t tell him
when she lost her virginity.
She told him about flying: how at first she felt like she’d never
learned to fly at all, the planes she was training in landed at nearly a
hundred miles an hour, which was faster than any cruising speed she’d
ever maintained. In a dive you could black out and blood would pour
out of your nose. Her old Cessna had put out about 70 horsepower,
and these things had two fierce engines that could get up to 1500 horse-
power, there’s the difference right there; they had retractable landing
gear to remember to retract, constant-speed propellers, a hundred
things to remember that she’d never encountered before.
She didn’t tell him about the women she’d heard of who’d lost con-
trol of a plane, or whose plane had failed them, who’d died in a crash.
Boredom and inaction were almost as large a part of it as danger,
though: sitting around the duty room gossiping and “hangar flying” as
they said, telling stories of this or that flight or near miss or cool bravery;
riding the milk train or, worse, the bus back from ferrying a plane; doing
paperwork; waiting; more waiting. Angling for the better jobs, for more
flying, fewer ground lessons, watching other women get ahead. There
was no way not to see that the WAFS, which became the WASP, was in
some ways a lot like college, like sorority, like school, like, yes, camp.
There was always a core group who never got in trouble for things that
348 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
others had to pay for, whose records stayed spotless when others were
washed out for minor infractions. They were the ones who shared a way
of talking, a line of jokes, a kind of insouciance, the ones that male com-
manders thought of as their sort of woman. Many of them had got their
licenses and their hours because they’d been able to fly their own planes,
had families that could afford them, and been able to spend summers
racing or barnstorming. She’d known such girls all her life, she was one
of them herself at the same time as she could never be one of them, she
didn’t give a damn about that, but she didn’t like getting sidelined or
blackballed either, for the one reason no one would say: and fortunately,
in this world and this time, what mattered most was how good you were,
farm girl, working girl, college girl, Jewish girl. She was good. She loved
the flying, loved learning she could fly huge bombers with as much ease
and certainty as she’d flown her old Cessna. And she came to love her
sisters. In spite of it all. Most of them.
“So now can I ask you a question?” Martha said to Prosper in the Dining
Commons in Henryville. Her comrades had departed for bed or the
Bomb Bay, and he’d told her his story and made his pitch, and she’d not
said yes or no, though No was obviously the right answer.
“Sure,” Prosper said. “Certainly.”
“Is that polio you have?”
“No,” Prosper said. “Something different.”
“Oh.” She looked around them, not as though she was about to tell
a secret, and yet for a reason, he thought. “My older brother,” she said,
“has polio.”
“Oh? Right now?”
“Well I mean he had it once. He’s. Well he has a wheelchair.”
“Oh.”
“He’s at home.”
“Uh-huh.”
He waited, ready to answer from his store of information and expe-
rience any question she might like to put to him; not many people
needed it.
“So where’ll you go when this is over?” Martha asked at length,
seeming to change the subject. “Home?”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 349
“Oh I don’t know.” He opened his arms. “Maybe see the world.”
She took that for a joke, or at least a whimsy, and in fact he some-
what drooped just after saying it. “You liked working here?” she said.
“It’s been pretty wonderful. Actually.”
“Because you got to do your part.”
“Because there’s no stairs.”
Martha studied him in puzzlement for a moment, then laughed.
“All right. I understand.”
“Is your brother working?”
“Him? Oh no. No, he had planned to go to law school, but then.”
Prosper nodded, nodded again, acknowledging. “Lots of stairs at
law school,” he said, “I’d imagine.”
Martha laughed again, a better outcome than he’d hoped for.
“Maybe if there weren’t,” he said, “I’d go be a lawyer.”
“Okay,” she said. “All right.”
He drew out his cigarettes, and shook one forth for her to take if
she liked, but she waved it away. “So Martha,” he said. “About this
request. This, this appeal. What do you think?”
“Well why do you want to do this for her? I don’t get it.”
“She’s. I mean she’s just.”
“I’m sorry,” Martha said, “but I get the feeling there’s something
about this you aren’t telling me.”
“It’s just important,” Prosper said helplessly.
“You tell me why it is,” Martha said. “Why it’s important to you,
and why you’re here asking and she’s not, and maybe I’ll give you an
answer.”
He told her the story, Diane’s, and told her his part in it too. It took
a while. She listened. At the end she was leaning forward on her crossed
arms, all ears.
“Well. Gee. I wouldn’t have thought.”
“Why? You mean a guy like me?”
She shrugged, smiling. “It’s natural to think.”
“Is it?”
“You’re blushing,” she said.
“Wouldn’t you say, though,” Prosper said, moving the ashtray
around as though it were a fixed opinion he wanted to loosen, “that
people are all the time thinking that only certain kinds of people can
350 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
do certain kinds of things? And you can’t change their opinion even if
you know better? Even if, for you, doing that thing, that thing you do,
doesn’t seem so unlikely to you, if it seems to you the most natural
thing in the world?”
She was blushing now herself.