they had gone up through the hole in the ceiling Mary Wilma pulled
up the stair behind them. It seemed to take no effort at all; Prosper
wondered why not.
There were other mysteries to be revealed in the dry dim warmth. A
harmonium whose cracked and mouse-chewed bellows could only
wheeze spooky groans like a consumptive or the ghost of one. A dress
dummy she hugged, calling out Ma, Ma. The dust on these things and
in the air, the slatted windows always open, the squeak of the gray
boards underfoot, which were so obviously the ceiling of the rooms
below.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 111
She had them play cards there on the floor with a wrinkled and dog-
eared deck. Go Fish. Slapjack. Then she taught him another one, a
good one she said, a better one. It was called Lightning. She laid out a
row of cards for herself and one for him, in complicated fashion making
piles and moving cards from one to the other.
“Now you take the bottom card of the first pile and put it on top of
the pile in the middle. No in the middle. No across-ways. That’s the
Boodle. You leave that there strictly alone. Now hold out your cards.”
She bent forward to transfer cards from his hand to hers and hers to
his. Some were laid down.
“Prosper! Not there! I told you!”
“You said before—”
“Now we have to start all over. Put down eight piles of three
cards . . .”
“It was seven before.”
She reached to grab his shirt, disordering the cards that were spread
in arcane ways over the floor between them. “You listen! Eight piles of
three!”
“You said before—”
“Do it!” she said.
He threw down his cards. “You’re just making it up. There isn’t any
game at all, just rules.”
She was laughing. “It’s fun! It’s a good game. You must do it.”
Her face was very close to his. “Stop being mean, Mary Wilma,” he
said. “Why are you so mean? Did somebody beat you with the mean
stick?”
She almost fell into him laughing, her laughter seeming to say that
he’d found out her secret or maybe that he was the funniest person in
the world, fixing him at the same time with her wide unbreakable gaze.
“Prosper!” she cried, as though he were a block away. “The mean
stick?”
“Yes!” he said, unable not to laugh too, and then she had grabbed
him again by the shirt.
“Prosper!” She’d stopped laughing, her fierce hilarity remaining
though. “Let’s take your pants off!”
He didn’t look away. “Let’s take yours off.”
She instantly did, reaching up under her dress and pulling down.
112 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
She lifted both bare legs in the air and slipped over her shoes the little
white bundle. Just as he did it himself every night. “Now you,” she
said.
Everybody grows up by leaps, and not by a steady climb like a
mountaineer’s. As though he had just been pulled up by the hair to
look over an enclosing ridge, Prosper hung in a space of Mary Wilma’s
creating, unable then to confute or even really to perceive what she had
done: she had taken off her pants but given nothing away, yet she had
certainly gone first, leaving him to go next, fair’s fair. All that Mary
Wilma was, and did, and would be; all that he was and knew, all now
altered. He started unbuttoning.
Afterward he always said, when he would ask her (or she would say,
inviting him), Let’s go play Lightning: and a few times up in the attic
they did lay out cards in Mary Wilma’s meaningless arrangements. But
these nongames became briefer and then were forgotten even though
the name remained as the name for what they did do. Mary Wilma,
after she had played that first trick on Prosper, was as willing as he was
to reveal, whipping off her jumper with practiced celerity as Prosper
stood before her, new flesh extruding strangely but interestingly from
him. “Now what’s this, ” she would cry, her hand shooting like a bird’s
claw to snatch it, gripping as though it might fly away. “What’s this
supposed to be! Huh, Prosper? What?”
As often though she liked to play a pretend game, as though naked-
ness relieved her of the heavy responsibilities of leadership and returned
her to an earlier time in her life when the world could all be invented.
She became or played a vague helpless party, moving as though under
water or in a dream, her act for Prosper. “Oh gee”—absent, distrait—
“oh look I have forgot my pants, oh dear. Here I am outside and no
cloath-es, what will I do. Oh my oh dear they all see me, oh they see
my posterior, oh boy, my buttawks, ooh what will I do. I will sit here
and wait for the trolley.” Her head lolled, she parted her legs where she
sat on an old trunk. “Oh dear now I must pee pee, now what, oh well
oh well I guess I just will, dum de dum de dum, can’t help it, ooh
oops.” The first time the game reached this point she just pretended,
making a sissing noise as her hands feebly grasped air, and the second
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 113
time too; but the third time, she lifted her dusty knees and regarded
Prosper with a face that mixed a hot triumphant Mary Wilma chal-
lenge into the fey person she was pretending to be; then she let go,
water spraying from the cleft in the girl way, not like his own straight
stream, wetting the box and the gray floor. His face and breast hot
with amazement and elation.
What they did in the attic (that word attic ever after retaining a
shadow of secret warm shared exposure for him) didn’t change Mary
Wilma’s ways out in the world with the others, and only later on did it
occur to him what a chance she’d taken with him, how brave she’d
been, those things they did together were riskier for her than any crazy
brave thing she’d ever done, than climbing up to the railroad bridge
from the river, than letting Hoopie Morris shoot her in her winter-
coated back with his air rifle to prove it wasn’t fatal like Hoopie stu-
pidly claimed: because Prosper could have told on her. He could, as she
certainly knew; as she would certainly have told on someone if she
needed to, to maintain her place. You know what Mary Wilma does?
Yelled someday when she bossed him or mocked him, as she never
stopped doing. You know what Mary Wilma does? And she would
instantly have been toppled as leaders in the news were; her power
would have vanished. Tears of rage, he could almost see it. Why would
she take that chance?
Because (Vi Harbison told Prosper in Henryville, having heard a
brief version of this, the first anecdote or instance Prosper offered,
though not one that in Vi’s opinion counted) because she trusted Pros-
per not to.
But why did she think she could trust him, Prosper wanted to know;
and if Vi knew, or had an idea, she didn’t say.
It didn’t go on long, but it didn’t end because one or both of them
decided to quit, or chickened out, not at all, but only because (as nearly
as Prosper could figure it later) it was just at that time that he was dis-
covered by the Odd Fellows, and went away to the hospital, and all
that happened thereafter began to happen, one thing falling into the
next and the next, until at last he wasn’t even living in the same neigh-