He would think then: There are thoughts you never think until, for
the first time, you do think them. And he would remember his father
telling his jokes, salesman’s patter, even as he cleaned the boy that
Prosper had been.
It wasn’t that his mother neglected cleanliness, health, and the body.
They were ever present to her mind, a threat and a promise she could
never get working together. She had been raised on medicine as though
on food: Wendigo Microbe Killer, Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, Hamlin’s
Wizard Oil liniment, Doctor Flint’s Quaker Bitters, cod-liver oil in the
winter and sulphured molasses in the spring. After her only child was
born she felt she deserved Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound to
reverse the bad effects; she sucked Smith Brothers cough drops (which
she fed to Prosper too) and was a user of Hadacol, which she found lots
better for her headaches than Coca-Cola. And as within, so without:
Prosper’s earliest memory was of hearing the enormous Hoover start-
ing up somewhere in the house, brand-new then possibly, anyway
unknown to him, an inexplicable noise at once roar and shriek and
coming closer; moving away; closer again, and evidently seeking him
out where he lay in bed. Then to find the great gray floor-sucker thing
entering his room, manipulated by his grim-faced mother, therefore
not dangerous at all, maybe.
His mother feared germs; her own earliest memory was watching
her bedroom stripped of its bedclothes, curtains, and toys, to be burned
in the alley after her scarlet fever. The Hoover was her defense, or her
offensive, against germs, that and lye soap, naphtha flakes, carbolic,
Old Dutch cleanser with the furious punitive bonneted figure on the
can that Prosper took as the image of his mother’s spirit, and scrub
brushes boiled weekly. Prosper, already afflicted by troubles that
seemed to get worse as he grew, caused her endless worry, she almost
feared to touch him, not only because of what he had inside him but
because of what he might have touched in the filthy world outside.
Once he brought home a stray dog, sick too, half-carrying it into the
house and supposing he might be able to keep it. His mother blocked
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 119
him and it with a broom from entering, prodding them away desper-
ately and calling on the deities. After that when she was sunk in her
cleaning he could sometimes hear her mutter the dog, that dog.
So if it had been up to her, Prosper likely wouldn’t have gone into
that hospital or under that knife, and what would have happened
instead was unknowable, and still is. It was Miss Mary Mack, her eyes
and eyelashes glittering as though frosted and her cheeks red from the
cold, who came to fetch him and bring him back there, which for all he
then knew she did out of kindness only: kind too to his helpless inert
mother fretting on the kitchen chair with two aprons on. Held his hand
when they mounted to the streetcar. Prosper found a certain satisfac-
tion, on his return, in telling his mother how blood had been taken
from him, right from the crook of his arm where this gauze was now
wrapped, and how he watched it rush out to fill the glass needle, thick
and dark as beet soup.
Just before he went into the hospital for the surgery, the Odd Fel-
lows held a little ceremony where the check for the costs was presented
to the hospital. The Odd Fellows ranged on the steps of the hospital
with the director and a doctor (who had to be persuaded to don his
white coat for the picture). Of the children who were to benefit from
the lodge’s efforts, Prosper and the pale blond girl were chosen to par-
ticipate in the event, Prosper with a tie of his father’s on and the girl in
white with a white hair bow so huge that it seemed she might be able to
flap it and fly away—and she looked as though she wanted to, stricken,
eyes alert as though to danger or downcast in shame. Prosper talked to
her. Her name was Prudence, and he laughed a little at that, mostly
from fellow-feeling with someone else not named Joe or Nancy, but she
only lowered her eyes again as though he’d mocked her. Still he stood
protectively by her while the pictures were taken and the man from the
newspapers asked their names. “Her name is Prudence. My name is
Prosper. P-r-o-s-p-e-r. Will the picture be in the paper?”
It was. It appeared the morning he was to go with his mother to be
admitted, a little suitcase packed with clean skivvies and socks and a
toothbrush and a dictionary (his mother’s choice) and some tonics and
vegetable pills (likewise). He studied the picture with her. There he was
with a big smile that made his mother shake her head, and Pru, her
great eyes looking up as though out of a burrow.
120 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Don’t let it turn your head,” his mother said, and it was the last
thing he clearly remembered her saying to him, though no doubt she
said more than that, taking him to the hospital and getting him onto
his white bed in the big ward and kissing him good-bye. Maybe because
he’d never heard the phrase before, and had to puzzle out its meaning.
Once, when months had passed, awake in the night in his plaster jacket
immobile in that ward, he thought what she had done was to warn
him: don’t let them turn your head. And unwittingly he had done that,
he had let them turn his head, and all that resulted was his own fault.
He’d imagined, for no good reason, that Pru would be given the bed next
to his, but in fact she wasn’t even in the long room of parallel beds, she
was in the ward below, for girls—he learned that when both their
wards and others joined in the great sunroom for marching each morn-
ing to a Victrola. Three mornings: he saw her each time, and spoke to
her, and at last she smiled to see him, her only friend (so her smile
seemed to say). Around and around they went as the oompah music
played, stopped, and began again, some of them on crutches, others
pushing themselves along on rolling frames or staggering rhythmless
on legs of different lengths. Pru walked as though always in the process
of falling over to her left, as her spine went, but she never did; she held
her hands curled up to the breast, as though she held an invisible plumb
line there, to see how far from true she bent, and to try and
straighten.
“Did you see your picture?” he asked her.
She looked away.
“You looked pretty,” Prosper said.
She looked into the distance, as though searching the halting shuf-
fling crowd for someone she knew.
“Do you talk?” Prosper said smiling. “Cat got your tongue?”
He thought the shadow of a smile crossed her face but still she
wouldn’t speak. The music stopped, skritched, resumed.
On the fourth morning they began to build Prosper’s cast, and there
was no more morning marching for him.
He had two nurses attendant on him for this, one kindly and calm,
the other brisk and dismissive of fears; the one lean and snaggletoothed,
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 121
the other plump and soft-armed. They had him follow them out of the
ward (observed by everyone) and down the hall to a bright room where
there was a table covered in rubber sheeting and piles of other things.
Talking, talking, first one then the other, they pulled off his nightshirt,
which they called a johnny for some reason, and hoisted him onto the
table to lie facedown, a little pad for his cheek, the horrid cold rubber