borhood, and—though this he never knew—neither was she. What
became of them all, she and Hoopie and Wally and the others whose
names he couldn’t recall, those he had once spent all day with, in school
114 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
or after, on Saturdays and Sundays? He rarely thought about them
afterward, but they certainly were a Passionate Series as Pancho Notz-
ing would later describe it to him—lovers of power and lovers of plea-
sure, the greedy and the indifferent, the retiring and the unhesitating,
an entire spectrum of human temperaments, needs, and wants, enough
anyway to make a complete society, the only one he’d ever know him-
self to be a member of until he came to live and work among the Teenie
Weenies still far away then in time and space.
2
That orthopedic hospital, though a source of civic pride pictured
on postcards that visitors to town could buy, was not used as
much as the founders and supporters had expected: not enough
people willing to go have the clubfoot or the gimp leg they’d
lived with for years corrected, or with enough money to pay for it. So
the local chapter of the International Order of Odd Fellows (whose
building, with its name at once comical and sinister, had hung over the
wasteland where Prosper’s gang had played ball) volunteered to survey
the county and learn who was in need, who could be helped, especially
among the children; and to raise the money to pay for the surgeries of
some. It was Mrs. Vinograd who brought Prosper to their attention,
Prosper and one or two others she had observed as well. Despite her
belief that Poor Posture could be overcome by will and self-control,
Mrs. Vinograd also believed in doctors and the advance of Medicine;
she believed in efficiency, in principle and in practice. She didn’t tell
Prosper or his mother what she had done, though, and when the two
moon-faced men in great double-breasted suits appeared at the Olan-
ders’ door and announced who they were and their interest in Prosper,
he assumed that they had come to claim him as one of their own: an
Odd Fellow, as they were; the lodge he was a member of.
When it became clearer what the two wide smilers actually meant
116 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
by coming there, Prosper’s mother lifted four fingers to her chin in
doubt or fear. “Oh dear,” she said.
“Get you some help, you see,” said one, gently, knowing to whom
he spoke.
“Well he’s been fine this far,” she said.
“But he could be fixed right up,” said the other Odd Fellow, and
tousled Prosper’s hair as though he were six, or a dog.
“Oh but an operation,” Prosper’s mother said. “An operation?”
“At no cost to you now or ever,” said the first, a salesman.
“But what about his schooling? That’s important too.”
“We’re just here to make sure the boy gets examined, ma’am.” He
drew out from within his capacious jacket a memorandum book and a
gold pen; and they all turned to Prosper.
Examined. To see, first, if it really was possible to fix him right up.
On a sloppy winter day Prosper and his mother took the streetcar to
the hospital, which stood on a rise above a raw new neighborhood on
the other side of the city. They had to cross a construction site on duck-
boards, then climb up a path and two flights of stairs to reach the
doors. There they made themselves known at the window, waited on a
bench in the echoey strange-smelling waiting room where hortatory
posters had been put up. His mother lifted her eyes to one after another,
patted her bosom, moaned almost inaudibly. One showed a funny man
about to sneeze, finger beneath his nose, and warned that coughing,
sneezing, spitting spread influenza! Another showed a family
man, his wife and child cowering behind him, desperately trying to
keep shut a door on the outer darkness where a vague white hideous
specter was trying to come in. Tuberculosis. Shutting the door on the
thing looked hopeless, though it wasn’t probably supposed to.
After a long time a nurse all in white, even to her shoes, called their
name and led them down wide high corridors across floors more highly
polished than any Prosper had ever seen, gleaming tile seeming to
vanish beneath his muddy feet as though he walked on water. Doors
opened on either side and he glimpsed people being ministered to, lift-
ing legs or arms with nurses’ help or playing slow games with big balls.
They were shown into a room to wait with other young people, other
culls of the Odd Fellows he supposed, some of them glad to see people
in their own case and lifting hands in salute or recognition, some who
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 117
wouldn’t meet his eyes. One a delicate pale girl with white-blond hair
carefully marcelled, her spine so out of true it seemed she had been cut
in two across the middle and the two parts put back together incor-
rectly. She shrank farther away as Prosper helplessly stared, as though
she could feel the gaze she couldn’t meet, and his mother at last pulled
his hand to make him stop.
The young doctor he was finally taken to see—hawk-faced, his hair
laid tight against his head with Wildroot oil, its odor unmistakable,
the same that Prosper’s father had used—made one judgment right
away. Prosper was to stop using the Boston girdle: it could do him no
good, the doctor said. He took it from Prosper and with thumb and
finger held it up, fouled with sweat and other things, edge-worn and
splitting, as though it were some vermin he had shot. Prosper’s heart
lifted.
Then he was taken, more wonderful still, to have an X-ray, the
nurse telling him it wouldn’t hurt and would show what the inside of
his body and his bones looked like, but Prosper knew all that, and
stepped up bared to the waist smartly and efficiently, put his breast and
then each side and his back against the glass as the doctor showed him;
it didn’t hurt, though he was sure he felt pass through him coldly the
rays without a name. Then that was all. Back through the waiting
room, still unable to make the pale girl see him, along the corridors
and through the doors and down the steps and home. Three weeks
later a letter came from the hospital saying that he was being consid-
ered as a candidate for surgical correction of spinal lordosis, and set-
ting another date for more examinations.
Prosper couldn’t know it, but even that first uneventful journey into
the hospital had nearly undone his mother. He did know that she was
someone to whom you couldn’t bring your bleeding body parts to be
bandaged, as she would faint, or say she was about to, and turn away
white-faced and trembling; also best not to tell her you’d thrown up, or
had sat on the pot with the gripes until a load of hot gravy was passed
that flecked the bowl and lid. These things were for you to know. Long
afterward, in one of those reassessments that come upon us unwilled,
like a sudden shift of perspective in a movie scene that shows the lurk-
ing villain or dropped gun that couldn’t be seen before, Prosper real-
ized that it was actually his father who had bound up his wounds,
118 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
carried him to bed in fever, washed out the white enamel basin ( Hasten
Jason bring the basin) with the horrid black chipped spots in it; and
that therefore it had certainly cost him something when his father
blew.