depending on where you came from in these States and how you learned
to name your daily meals) in the Main Dining Commons as you were
supposed to call the cafeteria, though no one did.
The cafeteria’s the source of some of Horse Offen’s best statistics—
five hundred pies an hour coming out of the ovens, three automatic
potato peelers peeling fifty pounds a minute and slicers slicing and
dumpers dumping them into batteries of French fryers over which a mist
of hot oil continuously stands. The thousands of Associates served every
hour. The specially designed dishes of unbreakable Melamine, washed
by the largest washing machines allowed under wartime regulations.
There’s a stage at the far end for shows and War Bond promotions, and
at the entrance, before the food service area, Henry Van Damme decreed
a fountain—white porcelain, round, a wide-lipped gutter surrounding a
column from whose many chromed faucets or pipe-mouths thin streams
of warm water pour when the foot treadle is stepped on. Not everybody
but almost everybody pauses there to wash, as the large sign urges them
to do, before they enter the serving lines beyond.
“He’s not a normal person,” Prosper Olander was telling the Teenie
Weenies around him, which included Francine, who might be the Lady
of Fashion, though dressed now like everybody in bandanna and over-
alls. “You should see him. Not even the photographs show you how big
he is. I mean he looks big in them but in the flesh he just takes up more
room. He’s a behemoth.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 69
“Well be he moth or be he man,” Francine said, with a Mae West
shrug to one shoulder, “he can put his shoes under my bed any time.”
The other women at the table—they were all women—laughed at that;
they said things like that around Prosper they wouldn’t have around
other men.
At the next long table some of the women were reading from an
article in Liberty magazine about the new world to come after the war,
and how men and women and even children will have been tested in
that fire, and how they’ll deserve the bounties of peace that the end of
the war will bring, when our enormous war power will be turned to
other uses.
“Well I don’t know,” a dark and somewhat saturnine woman said. “I
sorta can’t see it that way. I can’t see that this’ll come out right for us.”
“Who’s this us?” the reader wanted to know.
“Us who are getting these jobs, putting in these hours, earning this
overtime. Us here in this country, where we never were bombed, just
Pearl Harbor, nowhere in the States, and we’re not going to be. And
over there people starving and getting killed—I don’t mean soldiers,
everybody’s soldiers die and get wounded, I mean people who don’t
fight. People like us.”
“Hey we’ve made a sacrifice. Every one of us.”
“Yeah? Seems to me we’re actually doing pretty well. Seems to me.”
The women around her were variously dismissive, or scandalized,
or affronted. Some wanted to respond, wanted to tell her to shut up,
they were all doing what they could, but they didn’t say any of that.
“We’re doing too well out of this war,” she said at last, but more to
herself than to the rest. “It’s not right.”
She looked around herself then. No one who’d heard her was look-
ing her way.
“Well what do I know,” she said, returning to her meat loaf. “I’m
just a clog in the machine.”
Elsewhere, Larry the union shop steward was holding court, as
Pancho Notzing described it, at a table near to the one where Pancho sat
today. Pancho turned now and then to glare at him. Larry is something
of a bully, which many workers think is an all right thing, since he’s their
bully, and he’s won something or wangled something or mitigated some-
thing for a lot of them. Most of those at his table were men.
70 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Loud enough so that Larry was sure to hear it, Pancho himself
expatiated. “You know what they want to do,” he said. “They want
to put the whole population under the control of the government.
They want a labor draft—manpower to be shifted to whatever task
the military deems necessary. Conscription of free labor! Male and
female!”
“A crank case,” Larry said to his chums. He thumbed secretly over
his shoulder, indicating Pancho.
“A what?” one of them asked
“Yeah. One of those crank cases who comes along with some big
homemade idea about how people should live, how the society ought
to change, all out of his own brain.”
His chum was still regarding him puzzled. “Crank case?”
“Crank. Nut case,” Larry said testily. “Jeez.”
“Dear Mrs. Roosevelt thinks this regimentation should simply con-
tinue after the war,” Pancho said. “And very likely it will. The monop-
olies, the government, the army, and the unions will share out the
world, and we’ll be forced into a single mold, no more different from
one another than gingerbread men.”
“Why don’t you shut up, old man,” Larry said, turning his chair
suddenly with a scrape. “Nobody wants to hear your guff. This union’s
fought the company and the government for workers’ rights, and—”
“You just wait till this war’s over,” Pancho exclaimed, still facing
the crowd at his own table, who were now curious to see what would
happen next. “You’ll see. The unions, the government, the military, the
corporations, they’ll all knit together”—here he interlaced his own fin-
gers—“into one big grinding machine to grind our faces. We’ll all be
rich as Dives and miserable as worms.” He dabbed his lips with a paper
napkin. “The union, ” he said, as though that were all that needed to be
said about that, and tossed the napkin down.
Larry was out of his seat now, and still Pancho, nose lifted, declined
to notice him.
“You damn fool, you can keep your opinions to yourself, or I might
just jam ’em down your throat!”
Pancho arose and said something to his table about those without
reasons, who used blows instead. Larry threw a chair out of the way to
get at Pancho and now around him people were getting to their feet
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 71
and yelling Hey hey and other cries to quell argument. Pancho in a
graceful rapid move pushed up both his sleeves even as he took an old-
fashioned boxer’s stance, the backs of his fists to Larry. Larry appeared
startled at Pancho’s ready-Eddy defense and jutting chin, and backed
away, kicking the chair instead. “Ah go sit down, y’old dope. Who
needs your advice.”
Pancho maintained his posture for a moment more, then sat again,
dusting his hands.
That seemed to those at the tables a forbearance on Larry’s part, as
he was known to be a brawler not only practiced but ruthless—he’d
told how as a younger man he’d carried a set of brass knuckles, and
he’d won fights by slipping them on in his pocket while he and the
other man Stepped Outside, then he’d clip the other guy with a dis-
abling punch before the mutt knew what was happening, and slip off
the knuckles before he was caught with them: a history he seemed
proud of. He was smart enough, though—he said now, glaring at Pan-
cho’s back—not to start a fight in the damn cafeteria.