“I just mean,” he said. And he gestured to her. “You flying. The big
bombers. Tell me the men all thought you could do it, oh no problem
there. Tell me the other girls thought so. Tell me your mom thought
so.”
For a long time she looked at him, as though she was putting
together from all over her life the parts of a thought she’d never thought
before. Then she said: “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay I’ll take her.”
“Now you won’t tell her I told you all that.”
“No. Get her there at 0445 hours. That’s quarter to five, a.m. No
later or I’ll leave without her. One little bag, no more. She should dress
warm. Tell her if she pukes on me I’ll push her out the door.”
“I’ll tell her that.”
“Don’t you dare.”
They shook hands but then still sat for a while. Martha said she’d
probably be back this way soon, with another crew. Maybe they could
talk some more, she said, and Prosper Olander said oh sure, he’d defi-
nitely be here, he hoped they could meet, yes, he’d like that very much,
to meet and talk: he would.
6
You remember my friend Poindexter,” Danny said. “Bill.”
“Of course I remember him. I’m not going to forget that.”
They lay naked in the center of a bed big enough for three,
faint light of a single lamp in a far corner, the room was as vast
as a palace. Top o’ the Mark. This was the room that Danny had been
given, a suite actually, his buddies coming and going all day but all
gone now, leaving it to Danny and Diane. She’d not told him how she’d
got there, she’d put it a day back, a long train ride, not so bad though
she said, not bad at all, because it brought her here to him. Actually she
felt like she’d been carried here on a witch’s broomstick, it was the
most dreadful and terrifying thing she’d ever done, ever even imagined
doing, which she actually couldn’t have in advance. And that woman
Martha just grinning at her and making small talk and pointing out
the pretty lights below whenever Diane beside her could open her
eyes.
“He got hurt pretty bad,” Danny said. In this dimness his face was
hollowed and skull-like, the sockets of his eyes deep and his cheeks
sunken, as though he’d seen things that wouldn’t pass from him, as
though he went on seeing them always. “We had to land on the deck in
the dark. We’d just made it back from hunting the Jap carrier and it
was night. Lot of guys didn’t get back. Almost out of gas, you had to
352 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
set it down first try, couldn’t go around again and again. They’d lit up
the ship with every light they had, but it was still like landing on a
nighttime parking lot in the middle of a city. That’s when I got banged
up. Danny almost made it, but his tailhook missed the cable and he
went into the crash barrier and over the side. His plane broke up when
it went into the water. They got him out, but he’d crushed his left side.
He’ll live, but he’s lost an arm and a leg.”
“Oh Danny.” He’d said it all as though he were writing it in a letter,
or reading it from one: as though it were far away from himself, some-
thing heard of or remembered from long ago.
“Yeah well. He’s up and around, sort of. Sylvia’s leaving him,
though.”
“No.”
“Well.” He moved his dark body in the silky sheets. He’d lost
weight; his white north-land face was as dark as hers. “You can under-
stand, I guess. I mean he was—well he’s half a man. How was he gonna
keep her.”
“Oh Danny.”
“I don’t think I could do it,” Danny said. “He was damn damn
brave. Said he just wanted to live. I don’t think I could do that, live
with that.”
“Oh Danny no.” She covered her mouth, and her breasts.
“Don’t think about it,” Danny said and moved to hold her again.
She’d been afraid up to the last minute that he might be so war weary
or war torn or hurt that he wouldn’t be able to or want to, and then
where’d she be? But it was the reverse, he wouldn’t stop, clung to her
and pressed himself to her as though he could just disappear right
inside her and forget everything. She’d asked Prosper—asked him once
and then again, last thing before she’d climbed aboard that horrid
plane—if there was a chance that the baby she carried could turn out,
well, like him, Prosper. Whether the baby might have, you know, that.
No no, Prosper’d told her, no, no chance, that was an operation he’d
had that went wrong, not something in the blood you could inherit.
The same answer twice. But just now she thought of what she hadn’t
asked: what had that operation been for? What was it supposed to fix,
that it didn’t fix?
“Oh Danny,” she said, and said again, weeping even as she held
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 353
him, all she could say to mean so many things she couldn’t or didn’t
know how to say, the name of every grief endured or escaped, every
misunderstood grace, every utter loss, every hope, every new fear, each
one remembered as they embraced, felt as though for the first or the
last time.
Prosper got a letter from her a week later. She told him she guessed
the plan had worked. She’d decided to stay out there, she said, go home
again to her parents, just rest and take it easy and eat good food and be
careful for the baby until it was born. She’d write to her roommate, she
said, and get her clothes and things sent home, there wasn’t much
really, the way they all lived out there; the dungarees and gloves and
things could just be thrown out. She’d begun then to write something
more and crossed it out so hard he couldn’t even guess at the meaning,
or why she’d crossed it out: something she thought would hurt him to
read, or something she’d decided he shouldn’t know; something she
didn’t want to promise, or offer; something.
In the Bomb Bay a new band was playing, an all-girl one this time,
the Honeydrops. Their weary bus was outside, and their ruffled gowns
looked weary too, but they themselves weren’t, few as they were they
beat up a big sound; their singer wailing high above the horns and
clarinets, looking right at Prosper, as though the song she sang asked
him and him alone a question: maybe the other men there felt the same
but he was the only one who just sat and listened. Prosper was hearing
one of the songs she sang for the first time. She sang it holding the
microphone stand with tenderness and putting her lips almost to the
bulbous mike itself to croon, he’d never seen that before. She’d kiss him
once, she sang; she’d kiss him twice, and once again; it’d been a long,
long time.
In the coming year, when Bing sang this song, and the boys were
returning from Europe and then from the Pacific, it would be about
how hard it had been for them over there, about coming home at last to
wives and girlfriends. We’d hear it constantly; we can still hear it. But
when Prosper heard it sung there in the Bomb Bay well before it was a
hit, and with Diane’s letter in his pocket, it seemed to be not about men
but women. It seemed to be what those women, those hundreds of
thousands left behind here, might say to someone they might meet,
someone like himself: that they had waited a long long time, and were
354 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
going to get a kiss and more than a kiss now where and when they
could, until that man did come home, and everything would be differ-