played for the Van Damme teams, meeting new people. Men too. Never
anything serious. She told Prosper about one or two, dismissive, not
letting out of her locked heart the details he’d have liked to know.
“Oh well,” she’d say. “The trouble with that one was, the beginning
of the end came before the beginning.”
Prosper lifted his legs with one arm and swung them out of the bed to
put his feet on the floor, and sat up. “I know what you mean,” he said.
“Yes. ‘Love grows old, and love grows cold, and fades away like
morning dew.’ Like the song says.”
“Yeah. That’s sort of been my experience,” Prosper said.
“Oh?” Vi smiled, taking notice, her eyes soft for once, and she
spread out in the bed as though the coarse sheets were silk and she
liked the touch of them. “You got a lot of experience?”
“Some,” he said.
“Going way back?”
She was amused, apparently thought his claim was sort of funny,
extravagant or unbelievable, though he was trying to speak modestly.
“Pretty far,” he said.
“Really.” She rolled over and propped her broad cleft chin in a
hand. “You’re not that old.”
Prosper shrugged one shoulder.
“I wouldn’t have thought,” she said. “I mean, no offense, but it
wouldn’t seem you’d get around a lot. See and be seen. You know.
Some things you might not get around to doing.”
“Well not so many.”
“Uh-huh.”
100 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
There were, actually, plenty of things Prosper hadn’t ever done, and
some that he hadn’t done in years. He’d never gone to the public library
in the city where he’d grown up, never managed the long flight of stairs
up to the far-off double doors of the local one, or the even longer flight
(why “flight,” Prosper’d often wondered) to the even farther-off doors
of the central one downtown. Before his operation he’d gone on city
buses and on streetcars, when he could scoot up the stairs like a
monkey—everybody compared him to a monkey, his sloping back like
a knuckle walker’s and his long arms and big hands reaching for hand-
holds; something narrow about his pelvis too like the narrow nates of
a chimp. But by the time he reached what neither he nor anyone around
him then knew to call puberty (those gloomy films that Vi had seen in
high school—the ones shown in two versions, male and female—
weren’t shown to the special classes, as though there were no need for
Prosper and the others to have the information) he could no longer
mount the steps of a streetcar, couldn’t bend his knees when locomot-
ing, only when seated, with the locks on his braces slipped. That was
after his operation. He’d been to the movies, before that operation;
after it, getting to the pictures from his house had been the hard part,
and before his uncles Mert and Fred had taken him in hand and begun
squiring him around in the auto he’d missed a lot of good pictures.
Yes, lots of things undone, but lots of things done too, and many
(he might say “many,” though without any basis for comparison as
Pancho would put it) were of the kind Vi doubted.
“So tell me,” Vi said, still amused, seeming ready to hear something
funny, funny because it wouldn’t be what he claimed it was. She’d
know the difference. “Your turn.”
“Tell you what? You know my story.”
“These experiences, Prosper,” she said, “is what I mean.”
“You want to hear?”
“I do. It’s your turn. You tell me, and I’ll just listen.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t leave things out.”
“Okay.”
She lifted a forefinger gently to his lips, but as though to open them
rather than seal them. “Tell me,” she said.
PART TWO
1
Like the disabled and transected body of the Pax B-30 that once
lay in the long grass of the field over Hubbard Road from the
Ponca City Airport, the orthopedic hospital where Prosper Olan-
der spent two childhood years was still around long years after he
left it. It was one of those great brown-brick institutions that were built
to mark a city like Prosper’s as forward-looking, scientific, up-to-date.
Two others weren’t far away: the reform school, and the state school for
mental defectives. They had opened one after the other, starting with
the state school twenty years before Prosper was born, public ceremo-
nies and speeches from grandstands fronted with bunting, the buildings
in brown photographs looking raw and alone on their wide plots of
treeless land. They’re all gone now: the state school abandoned and der-
elict, the reform school torn down for an office building, Prosper’s hos-
pital subsumed into a medical center and unrecognizable. But such
places remained, though having changed their meaning: from works of
benevolence they became dark holes in our child society, places to which
the failed and the unlucky were remanded. You too if you put a foot
wrong. You’re gonna end up in reform school. They remain in our
dreams.
Prosper was nine years old before the curvature of his spine became
something out of the ordinary and started gaining him nicknames, and
104 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
looks, pitying or repelled or amused. The few doctors his mother took
him to (for diphtheria, when he nearly died; for tonsilitis, his tonsils
snipped with a miniature garotte; for a broken thumb) all told her that
he’d grow out of it, most kids did. He didn’t. In the fourth grade he was
sent to a special class for the first time, as much for dreamy inattention
and a kind of cheerful solipsism as for his back and his pigeon-toed
knee-rubbing walk; he’d go in and out of special classes like a relapsing
criminal as he went from school to school, when he was allowed into
school at all. His teacher that year, Mrs. Vinograd, took an interest in
him; she had ideas on posture that she thought he illustrated.
“Prosper, come here and stand before the class. Take your shirt off,
please, dear. Yes. Now stand in profile, so the class can see clearly.”
Cold pointer drawn down his naked back. “You see how Prosper’s
spine differs from the normal spine. Here it curves in where ours are
straight. This pushes the abdomen forward and causes the chest to
recede.” Taps of the pointer, front and back. Prosper loved and feared
Mrs. Vinograd, her long torso arising high and straight from her solid
hips like a hero’s statue from its pedestal, her eyes large, darkest brown
and all-seeing; and he didn’t know whether to exaggerate for her the
sticking out of his tummy, to illustrate her remarks, or to straighten
up, as she otherwise wanted him to do. “Doctors call it the Kit Bag
Stoop. As though Prosper were carrying a kit bag, that pulls his
shoulders back and down. And what is the cause of this deformity,
whose real name is lordosis?” They all knew, all called out. “Yes,
that’s right, boys and girls, the cause is Poor Posture. Prosper you may
dress again, and take your seat. Ah, ah, ah! Posteriors against our seat
backs, dears, chin high, head straight above our shoulders!” There
were those who laughed when Mrs. Vinograd said “posterior,” but she
would take notice of that, and no one wanted to follow Prosper and be
ordered to exhibit other forms of Poor Posture, the Obesity Stoop, the