doctor above, with everything and nothing to say. “So maybe I’ll still
get over it someday.”
“Sure thing,” the doctor said. “Maybe you will.”
3
He’d been in the cast for four weeks, with as much at least left to
go, when he got a visitor again. His own visitor, not like the
actress or the ballplayer who visited everybody, going from bed
to bed followed by reporters and helpers and the doctor, smiling
and kissing one or two while the flashbulbs went urgently off.
Two visitors in fact: his aunts, Bea and May. Bea was the older
sister of his mother, and May the younger sister of his father. Bea was
taller and blonder, with heavy curls that seemed to burden her head,
and May was small and dark, her hair cut short when it became all
right to do that, and unchanged since. He had never seen them apart,
so it was also like having one visitor.
“Hello, Prosper,” Aunt Bea said. “You remember me. And here’s
May too.”
“Hello, Aunt Bea. Hello, Aunt May. Sorry I can’t stand up.”
“Oh, now, Prosper,” said May. The nurse pushed over an extra
chair by the bed so they could sit, both on their chair’s edge, both
clutching their purses. “So what now’s all this they’re doing to you? Is
all this proper?”
“They have to tug him straight,” said Bea confidentially to her.
“Well, I must say,” May said, “you’re quite the brave fellow, putting
up with all this. I never could.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 129
“It’s fine,” Prosper said. “I’ll be doing fine. I might need a little help
in walking.”
“Oh. Oh.”
Charlie in the next bed now stirred, and Prosper—somehow the
two kind outspoken ladies made him want to be punctilious and cor-
rect—indicated him. “Aunt May, Aunt Bea,” he said, “I’d like you to
meet my friend Charlie,” and here he realized he’d never heard or didn’t
remember Charlie’s last name. Charlie’d come out of his own plaster
cast in that week, and his muscles, released from long confinement,
were going crazy, having forgotten all that Charlie had tried to teach
them or just wild with freedom; he put on quite a show lifting himself
in the bed to greet the two ladies, sheets astir and pajamas twisted,
head tugged sidewise and mouth working as though he were catching
flies around him. But he said “Pleased to meetcha” pretty well, and
then said it again, happy with the success of it. The two ladies smiled
and nodded, interested, and Bea took from her large bag a small stack
of cookies, which she handed around.
“How’s my ma?” Prosper asked, eating. “Is she coming?”
Bea and May shared a look—it was a thing they did, that Prosper
would become accustomed to, their heads turning together like con-
nected gears to lock in place, and the knowledge, or the unease, or the
wonderment or puzzlement passing between their wide eyes and big
long ears, you could almost see it in transit. Then both together back.
“She’s not been well,” said May.
“She’s been poor,” said Aunt Bea. “She’s getting better.”
They added nothing to that, and Prosper didn’t know what further
to ask. Bea cried Well and from her bag began to take out more things,
books and puzzle magazines, Lucky bars, the bag was like a magician’s
fathomless top hat; finally half a cake cut in slices. The ward around
them, at least those that were mobile, began to be drawn to Prosper’s
bed like a school of fish to fish food until they were all around and the
aunts were handing around cake.
“Prosper, what do you think,” May said. “When you’re all better
and out of this contraption. Would you like to come and stay with us
for a while?”
Prosper’s mouth was full, so he couldn’t say anything, and had a
moment to think. He liked the women. Once he’d spent a night at their
130 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
house while his mother went away to another city to visit a practitioner
of some sort, he couldn’t remember for what illness, and Bea and May
had entertained him royally, ice cream in three flavors, games of Snap
and Crazy Eights, dancing to late-night bands on the radio, the two of
them laughing and pulling his leg and smoking Turkish cigarettes in
holders. He thought they liked him too, something he was never sure
about with his parents.
But he said: “I’d have to go home first. To be with my ma.”
“Well sure,” May said, and looked away smiling to the crowd of
hungry jostling boys around her. Bea was helping Charlie with his slice,
gazing with admiration at how he wielded his fork and made it to his
face with almost every bite, and didn’t turn to Prosper, as though she’d
heard none of that. May remarked that when Prosper was out the two
might get together, he and Charlie, and she wrote down for Charlie her
own telephone number, which Prosper thought was remarkable.
Before they left, the aunts brought out one last present they had for
him, a long box of dark wood with a brass catch, beautiful and rich,
and inside, richer still, laid into the grooves of the paper liner, a spec-
trum of colored pencils: all in rainbow order, but shading subtly from
blue to blue-green to green-blue to green, orange to red-orange, crim-
son, scarlet. They had all been pointed, not by penknife but by machine,
flawlessly. He could hardly imagine disturbing them in their perfec-
tion, almost wanted to assure the two women that he never would,
never spoil this thing that opened like a promise before him. Later they
wondered if maybe he hadn’t liked the gift: so quiet. But oh my: the
poor kid had so much to think about, didn’t he.
The nurses rigged up a table or desk surface hanging upside down
from a frame over Prosper’s bed and clipped his papers to it, so that
even mostly prone he could use his pencils to draw. He started by
simply edging his papers with great care in bands of color, thicker and
thinner, as though making a larger and larger frame for a picture that
he never drew. Then he began making letter shapes, copying from
newspaper headlines the strange forms full of barbs and hooks and
thick and thin lines, making up the letters that he couldn’t find. He
made name signs for the beds of the other boys, each of them putting
in his own requests as to shape and color and nickname. “We know
their names,” Nurse Muscle Eenie said, and removed these distrac-
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 131
tions. He started making only one name, planting the dry sticks of it as
though in a garden, where it grew strange buds and blossoms in red,
violet, aquamarine, and sienna: the name was prudence. He’d send
them with one of the nurses to deliver to her on her ward, and get back
her thanks or none, and draw another.
His aunts came now and then to see him, though never his mother.
On one occasion it wasn’t they but two uncles, whom he knew by sight
but had rarely spoken to before—Uncle Mert and Uncle Fred, bearing
a box of chocolates, keeping their hats and coats on. They didn’t have
much to say. Mert extracted a cigar from his pocket and bit off the tip,
was about to light it too as the children stared in glee, too bad the
nurse just then told him no. Mert called her Sister. Say, Sister, when’s
the boy gonna be up and at ’em. Say, Prosper, you look like a turtle in
that shell, naw, you look swell, kid. They didn’t stay long, though Pros-
per shone briefly afterward in the ward in their reflected raffish glare;