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