Dentist’s Stoop (“from eternally bending over patients to extract
teeth, don’t you see, dears”), or the scoliosis that brings on Da Costa’s
Syndrome and Irritable Heart.
Mrs. Vinograd was sure Prosper could fully straighten himself out,
and if he could he would do better in school, and be able to pay closer
attention to what was said to him, and sleep better and awake refreshed;
distortion of the food-pipe was giving him digestive problems, she
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 105
thought (she had come to his house, right to the house where he lived, to
talk this over with his mother), and indigestion was making him logy. It
had once been believed, she said, that nervousness, irritability, bashful-
ness, torpidity, and so on were causes of Poor Posture. Now it was under-
stood that Poor Posture itself induces those conditions! Isn’t that
remarkable? Mrs. Olander, nearly as awed as Prosper was to have opened
the door and found towering Mrs. Vinograd on the step in velvet cloche
and cape, could only murmur assent and shake her head at the strange-
ness of it all, as Prosper in his seat pulled himself up, up, up.
He tried hard not to give in to the spine within him, which seemed
to want to settle, relax, soften, and give up on holding him upright.
Secretly though, unsaid even to himself, he wanted to take its side,
sorry for the continual effort he demanded of it. And since the lordosis
never got better, he guessed he had done that, somehow thus winning
and losing at once. That’s how it seemed, later on, when he examined
how he had felt then, as a kid; which was like someone looking back at
how once he’d struggled to find his way lost in the woods, just a while
before he fell off a cliff.
Prosper was a war baby; his father was a soldier, or became one the
day after Prosper was conceived. On the night before he’d left for Over
There (though actually he’d never got nearer to the front than a desk at
Fort Devens) he’d got his wife pregnant. She had a long-standing horror
of pregnancy that she could never account for and was ashamed to feel;
the next many months as Prosper grew steadily within were filled with
a dread she never spoke of and yet efficiently communicated. Not to
Prosper; but certainly to her husband, home on leave, hovering at the
bedroom door and wondering what to do, wondering if she would die,
or sicken irremediably.
Like all the women in her family Prosper’s mother-to-be was a
believer in Maternal Impression: if you witness a bloody accident while
pregnant, your child can be born with a port-wine stain; hear a piece
of dreadful news (the kind that all in a day can turn your hair to gray)
and the fetus can squirm in revulsion within you (hadn’t the women
felt this, or heard that it had happened to someone?) and at birth it
might appear wrong way around, unable to be got at. So she stayed
indoors, and wouldn’t answer the telephone for fear of what she’d hear,
and sat and felt her substance looted and applied to the new being, as
106 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
you rob clay from the big snake you’ve rolled to make the little one.
Nothing bad happened, except that she grew hugely fat with little to do
but consider her cravings and try to replace her lost insides. When he
appeared at last, held aloft by his ankles, Prosper seemed just fine, long
and blood speckled, and with a huge dark scrotum and penis (an illu-
sion or temporary engorgement that nearly put a Maternal Impression
for good on his mother’s spooked heart to see).
Kids growing up, especially the singletons, don’t consider their par-
ents to have particular natures, or characters that can be named; they
love them or fear them or struggle with them or rest in them, as though
they were the weather, or a range of mountains. When Prosper was
eight or nine, a girl who lived in the upstairs apartment described his
father as a Gloomy Gus, and Prosper, baffled at first, was astonished to
feel, as he repeated the words to himself, the great enveloping cloud of
his father shrink and coalesce into just a person, a person of a certain
kind, a small broody man in a derby and a pin-collar shirt, carrying a
sample case, eternally stooped, the Salesman’s Stoop.
Maybe he was just made that way. There was no reason for Gloomy
Gus in the funnies to be gloomy except that he was, as there was no
reason for his brother Happy Hooligan to be happy. That his father’s
gloom might have a cause was a further step in perception; but it may
not ever have occurred to Prosper at all that the cause was Prosper
himself, or—even tougher—that his father regarded him as a plenty
good reason, a source of troubles. There was the damage done to his
wife’s soul by Prosper’s tenancy of her body. Then the weakness of
Prosper’s own body, which was somehow responsible for all that had
gone wrong in those nine months, and was still wrong. Eventually the
doctor bills, and the prospect of more of the same, endlessly. The mis-
aligned boy scuffling beside him as he walked the street, every eye on
them (he believed) in curious pity. All Prosper knew was that a light-
ness would possess him when his father set out on the road, gone for
days sometimes; and a contrary melancholy sunset at the man’s return.
For that he now had a name. He even had, in the name, a justification
for wishing he’d not return: for the doing of magic in various home-
made forms to insure that he stay away, delay, be stuck in snow or in
badlands, never darken the door again. And one day he left, as usual,
and then didn’t return. Just didn’t, and wasn’t heard from ever after.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 107
This time, strangely, having left his two sample cases behind. Prosper,
awed and gratified about as much as he was guilty and stilled, would
open the closet door now and then to look at those dark leather lumps,
his father’s other body, still remaining.
For a time he watched and waited to see if his mother would hate
him for her husband’s disappearance, which she might suspect her son
had brought about by his little deals with the powers—avoiding the
cracks on the sidewalk, wishing on dandelion moons and train whis-
tles—and for a time she did regard him in something like reproachful
grief. But he was convinced she was as much better off without Gloomy
Gus as he felt himself to be; and she almost never mentioned him. She
was, as she said herself, not much of a talker. There was so much family
surrounding them, and so many of those were disconnected from
spouses or otherwise out of the ordinary (two aunts, one each of his
mother’s and his father’s sisters, who lived together; an uncle and his
wife and nearly grown kids living in a nearby house with another single
uncle in a spare room; a grampa a few blocks away cared for by a
grandniece; others whose connection to himself and one another he
had not yet worked out) that the jigsaw puzzle piece that was Prosper’s
part, though changed now in shape, still fit all right.
And the vanishing of his father (and their income with him) brought
to his house—at the instigation of those various uncles and aunts and
others, his mother wouldn’t have known to do it, though Prosper knew
nothing of all that—a caseworker from the city welfare bureau. Her
name was Mary Mack, and she wasn’t dressed in black black black but
favored tartans and a tam and was the most beautiful person Prosper
had looked upon up to that time, her bright kindly eyes and the plain