under his nakedness. He knew you were not supposed to mind if nurses
or doctors saw your posterior.
“He’ll be a brave little fella,” said Nurse Kind.
“He better be,” said Nurse Brisk. “This’s the easy part.”
They had sheets of black felt and a big scissors, and cut pieces out
and laid them on his back from neck to knees, patting and stretching
them into place. Then they ran water at a sink and did other things he
couldn’t see while they talked to each other about this and that, Hoover,
the talkies, Rudolph Valentino and Rudy Vallee—for a long time Pros-
per thought these were the same person, one the nickname of the
other.
“Okay dearie, this is going to get a little damp,” said Nurse Kind.
“Move a muscle and I’ll brain you,” said Nurse Brisk, which made
Nurse Kind laugh dismissively. Something wet and heavy was laid on
him, at his neck, and the nurses ceased their chatter, only murmuring
to each other as they worked the wet plaster bandages to fit him before
they hardened. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before and the desire to
wriggle out of it, clamber up and get out, was nearly irresistible, the
nurses must have known it and kept their hands on his legs and head to
keep him still while the clock on the wall ticked away.
When they were done, they removed the hardening cast, turned him
over and made the front the same way, right down to his groin, leaving
a space for him to make water. The back side had a hole too, neatly
edged in rubber. They showed it to him when it had all dried and been
trimmed and lined with felted cloth and fitted with straps and toothed
buckles; it was the last time he’d see the backside till it came off, long
after.
Laid in this cast like a turtle—the plastron part could be unbuckled
and removed, now and then, but he was told never to get out of the
back part—he should not even allow himself to think about getting
out. He didn’t have to lie flat on his back, the bed itself had a crank
122 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
that could move it up and bring the world into view and his head in
right relation to it, gratifying.
In the next bed a boy was looking at him, or seemed to be looking
at him, though his head and face were hard to assess, because he
seemed to be in the grip of some invisible opponent he wrestled with,
straining every muscle. He made sounds that might have been lan-
guage.
“Did he say something?” Prosper asked the nurse.
“May have,” the nurse said, not looking at the fellow. “Sometimes
he does. He’s a spastic and we don’t know what else.”
Prosper looked over at the boy in the bed. He was definitely study-
ing Prosper, though with what intentions or thoughts Prosper couldn’t
tell—not dull or idiotic he was pretty sure. “Hello,” he said.
The other seemed gratified to be greeted, and said something back.
“Try harder, Charlie,” said the nurse, not looking at him. “Or be
quiet. Nobody can guess what you mean.”
Charlie rose up in his bed, as though lifting himself by puppet
strings, and seemed ready to fling himself out, his mouth working. The
nurse turned to him and, hand on his chest and her face close to his,
pushed him back. “I’ve told you about this, Charlie. You lie still and be
a good boy. It’s for your own safety. Don’t make me get the straps.”
At this Charlie sank back and stopped talking, though he went on
moving; if you watched you could tell that the muscles he gave orders
to were constantly revolting or refusing, and he had to continually
change the orders, so that he was never quite still. When the nurse had
passed to the next bed, Charlie spoke again to Prosper.
“Sheeez a caution. Ain she.”
“I’ll say,” Prosper answered.
“Oooh shth. Shthink she. Is. Muscle Eenie?”
It wasn’t hard to understand once you listened. Prosper got it and
laughed, and Charlie laughed too. Nurse Muscle Eenie turned to look
back at them—like all powerful persons, she had a keen sense of when
she was being mocked—but that only made them laugh the more.
Prosper, spending long hours beside Charlie, got good at under-
standing what he said, and sometimes translated what he said for the
nurses, who seemed to have very little patience with him and to assume
most of the time that he was muttering nonsense, and would talk back
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 123
to him as though he were a baby. “He’s not stupid,” he explained to
one of the nurses as Charlie listened. “He’s just spastic. If you listen
he’s not stupid.”
“He’s not a spastic,” said this nurse. “He’s an athetoid. There’s a
difference.”
Prosper actually thought Charlie was the wittiest kid on the ward,
his jokes all the funnier for being unexpected or hard to decode—it
really was hard to tell when Charlie was trying to be funny, though
Prosper got that too at last.
The other person who understood Charlie fine was his father, who
came often to see him, once bringing Charlie’s mother and three small
sisters, though all these visitors were too uproarious and Nurse Muscle
Eenie made it clear that from now on they were to come one at a time
and not upset the routine as she said. So it was mostly his father who
came, and sat by his bed; his presence seemed to still Charlie’s mus-
cles, at least to lower the spasms from a boil to a simmer. It was Char-
lie’s father who explained to Prosper that Charlie’s muscles weren’t
weak, they just wouldn’t listen to his brain. They were plenty strong:
in fact Charlie was here to get a couple of them released—they’d been
holding parts of Charlie tight since he was a baby, and didn’t know
how to let go.
“So he’s gotta go under the knife,” said Charlie’s father smiling a
little sadly. “Right, son?”
“That’ll show ’em,” Charlie said. He held up his left hand, which
curled backward toward his wrist, and made a face at it that was sup-
posed to be tough and uncompromising.
Prosper’s mother came too, once, though she had a great reluctance
to come too close to where Prosper lay in his cast; she stood a ways off,
her hands clasped, as though the left were keeping the right from touch-
ing anything around her. Prosper could tell she suffered, though not
what she suffered from, and tried to ask her about life out beyond the
hospital; he told her about Prudence and about Charlie and his mus-
cles, but she seemed not even to want to open her mouth much and
swallow the air in there.
“I’m going under the knife,” Prosper said. “Any day.”
“Oh Prosper,” she said. “Oh Prosper.”
Soon the nurse came close: visiting hours were over, ambassadors
124 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
from the world beyond were to depart. Prosper’s mother kissed her
son. The ward returned to the state it ought to have, just the children
and their noises and cries, the circulation of the nurses, like horses in
their sweaty hardworking domineering presence, great rumps and
thighs beneath their white cottons or lean hard shins and the crack of
their heels against the ward floor. They caught boys out of bed and
heaved them back in like grain sacks, threatened and chastened and
stilled them with a look as Miss Vinograd had done, though they were
gentle with the ones who moved less or not at all, teaming up to move
them from their beds to the rolling carts that took them to hydrother-
apy or elsewhere, who knew where, and back again. On three, lift.