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, frantic 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