sturdy way she plunked down her mysterious buckled bag, from which
she drew out printed forms and other things. Even his mother smiled to
see her coming down the street (she and Prosper keeping watch at the
window on the appointed days), though his mother always made it
clear to him that Miss Mack’s visits were nobody’s business but theirs
and shouldn’t be mentioned anywhere in any company.
Anyway it was another society that engaged most of Prosper’s alle-
giance and concern then, the one made up of personages that grown-
ups don’t see or hardly see, as unknown to them as the society of bugs
in the weeds, only brought to notice if they sting or fly at you repul-
108 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
sively: the neighborhood’s kids. The map of their world overlay the one
they shared with their elders (the one marked with the church and the
other church and the market and the streetcar stop and the school and
the public baths and the free clinic), the same geography but with dif-
ferent landmarks: Death Valley, which was what they called a treeless
waste between the back of the bowling alley and the Odd Fellows
lodge, where treks and battles happened; the nailed-up—but by them
reopened—three-hole privy in the scruffy woods in the slough behind
the big hotel, why there, who knew, but ritual required it to be used
each time it was passed, by all, girls, boys, young, old, leaders, follow-
ers; the railroad bridge abutment where the hoboes slept, where over
scrapwood fires they cooked their beans and luckless kids’ body parts.
Prosper wasn’t the only funny-looking or oddly shaped one among
them; any neighborhood gang could show a kid, Wally Brannigan was
theirs, who illustrated with a sightless peeled-grape eyeball the inces-
sant adult warning about what happens when you play with sharp
sticks and improvised bows. Little Frankie No-last-name had had rick-
ets and walked with an invisible melon between his legs. Sharon was
hugely tall, like Olive Oyl. Only Frankie and Prosper among them
found it hard to keep up, and Frankie was younger than the others and
weepy and didn’t count, which left Prosper at the bottom of the heap,
helped along sometimes, or mocked, or nicknamed; by one or two of
the strong, actively despised. He could hit a baseball pretty well, though
sometimes a big swing caused him to lose his balance and fall in a
heap, and he rarely beat the throw to first. Then a designated runner
was assigned to him, the biggest kid on their side, who had to piggy-
back Prosper to the bag. Hit the ball, leap onto Christopher’s back, be
carried at a jouncing run, laughing and sometimes falling together in
stomach-aching hilarity halfway down the base path while the rest of
the field looked on in disgust—but sometimes bearing down with bared
teeth at full gallop, scaring off the first baseman and stamping across
the base.
It was Mary Wilma who decided it was not against the rules for
Prosper to be carried by the pinch runner, in fact she determined that
it was required. Mary Wilma was the smartest kid among them, or at
least the most decisive; if something needed to be settled, Mary Wilma
came out with a plan before anybody else had even had time to decide
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 109
what was what, and if she met disagreement she was loud and definite
in pointing out why she was right and the other was wrong, which was
usually the case.
“Mary Wilma, I don’t want to do your idea.”
“Well it’s smarter than your idea. Prove it isn’t!”
“I don’t care. I just don’t want to.”
“Tell me why you don’t, stupid bubuncle! Idioso! Come on! I’ll
believe you if you can tell me!”
She said or shouted them, her directives and her made-up insults,
with such fierce delight, her big dark eyes aflame and big mouth smil-
ing, that it was hard to hate her, though everybody at some time said
they did; and it was after all she who organized the great watermelon
theft, and the Halloween bonfire extravaganza, and the nighttime
kick-the-can eliminations. She liked to stage field days, and kept care-
ful score: she ran faster than anybody else, not that she was so fast a
runner, or longer legged, she just put so much concentrated heat into it,
more than anyone else could summon or cared to summon, her legs
scissoring and her eyes fixed on the goal.
Mary Wilma took an intense interest in Prosper, thinking up things
he had to do to keep up, ways to put him to use, ways to insult him
too.
“Here comes Prosper on his little horsie!” Meaning his odd tippety
gait, it took Prosper a while to figure that out; Mary Wilma never said
anything meaningless, though it might at first seem so. “What’s your
little horsie’s name, Prosper? Is it a hoobie horsie?”
Of course he yelled back the meanest things he could think of, which
amused her further, expert boxer or knife fighter challenged by a child;
but he stayed near her, if only because it lessened the likelihood of his
getting beaten up, chances of which went up after he started having to
wear a back brace of leather and buckles and metal. Mrs. Vinograd
made the horrible error—mortal, irreversible, to Prosper—of calling
this device a Boston girdle. Which was its name, in fact, but which
when said out loud before the class was curtains for the wearer. Mary
Wilma on the playground or in the alleys liked to name it too, at top
volume, and it was she who began then to call Prosper Coozie Modo,
which even those who hadn’t gone to see Lon Chaney tormented in the
movie (Prosper hadn’t) knew to be a killing taunt. Never mind: if he
110 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
stayed near her he wouldn’t be kicked or pelted with dingbats—those
who liked the idea of doing that were also the ones most afraid of Mary
Wilma, her needle-sharp sense of each of their weaknesses and inade-
quacies; and she didn’t allow group activities she hadn’t conceived of.
Her family had a house a few blocks from Prosper’s, a whole house
that they rented part of to others but whose basement and attic and
weedy garden and shed were all theirs, a huge domain, and she brought
Prosper there and took him all through it. She revealed its arcana to
him only slowly, watching his reaction to certain mysterious or alarm-
ing items as though he might not rise to the occasion, as though others
before him perhaps had not: in the basement ancient pickled things in
jars of murky fluid, which she claimed were babies but surely were only
pig’s feet or tongues; in the shed a black metal hook that she said had
once served her grandfather as a hand, its brutal rusted tip still sharp—
what had the old man done with it, to whom? She menaced Prosper
with it, and he didn’t flinch, though he wouldn’t touch it himself.
Anyway maybe it wasn’t what she said it was, because she was a big
liar, as Prosper told her, as everybody told her; she didn’t seem to
mind.
“Go on,” she said, pushing him from behind. They went up the
halls to the top of the house, where a rope hung that pulled down a
flight of stairs leading to the attic. “You probably never saw this
before,” she said as the staircase descended gently, treads rotating into
place. He shrugged nonchalantly, but he hadn’t. Mary Wilma had just
had her black hair bobbed, and Prosper couldn’t stop looking at the
tendons of her neck and the hollow between, like a boy’s now but not
like a boy’s. “Up we go, little Prosper,” she said. “Up up up.” When