topped desks and swivel chairs and gooseneck lamps and filing cabi-
nets, as well as typewriters, time clocks, and adding machines. She
never regarded her job as her calling, as Bea did hers. She complained
about the time it took from her real life, which was lived in the realm
of the spirit: her delicate, years-long negotiation with a disembodied
child who communicated with May by various means. The child—
whose name was Fenix Vigaron—taught May a lot, but also lied to her
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 139
atrociously, apparently just for the fun of it, and had another friend
among the living somewhere in Servia or Montenegro, a friend who
got different help, maybe better help (the child hinted with casual cru-
elty) than she was willing to give to May. No one in her office knew
about May’s other life; but there, with her journal and ledger and her
in-box and out-box, no matter how fast she moved May seemed to
herself to be standing still, whereas sitting in stillness awaiting the
dead child’s touch she seemed always to be moving, however slowly,
toward something.
Bea was always glad to get whatever advice Fenix Vigaron had for
her, but May was shy about revealing her experiences to others; too
many of them believed in things that May didn’t believe in for her to
talk to them about Fenix. They would go on about how their mothers
and lovers and babies had called out to them as they sat holding hands
in darkened rooms with paid mediums, but—May wanted to know—
how could the only dead souls who mattered to you be just the ones
your medium’s spirit guide could introduce you to? Wouldn’t it be more
likely that they wouldn’t be acquainted with them, among so many, the
Great Majority? It was like running into someone who hails from a
distant city where you yourself know one person, and asking, Say do
you know Joe Blow, he’s from there—and of course he doesn’t. May’s
little angel or devil couldn’t give May news of her brother, Prosper’s
father; she couldn’t say if he was actually among them over there now
(as May believed), and didn’t seem to care either; nor did she ever come
to know Prosper’s mother, so as to bring any comforting words from
her. May told Prosper anyway: your mother’s happy now; nothing can
hurt her now; I know it’s so. Prosper nodded, solemn, as it seemed he
should do. Prosper knew nothing then about Fenix Vigaron, though
Fenix knew all about him.
The two women had taken on the orphaned Prosper (they’d agreed
to regard him as an orphan, though Bea had her doubts) because they
could, and because there was no one else not already consumed with
their own children, or with the care of some other displaced or incom-
petent relative, or who wasn’t just unsuitable, like Mert and Fred, into
whose families (if they could be called that) you wouldn’t want to insert
any growing innocent.
But how to meet his needs, practical and spiritual, a male child,
140 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
they themselves not so young and flexible as once they were? He’d have
to have a room of his own, and (it took a while for them to grasp this)
not at the top of the stairs, where theirs and a little spare room were.
The only choice was the downstairs room the women called the parlor,
though it was small and dim and they rarely used it, preferring the big
bright room that ought to have been for dining. Thank goodness the
bathroom was downstairs.
So they sent Mert and Fred a note telling them that their next task
was to empty this room of its horsehair sofa and mirrored sideboard
and grandfather clock and glass-shaded lamps and store them safely
somewhere, then bring in instead a boy-size bed, a dresser and a ward-
robe where he could put away his clothes and his, well, his things,
snips and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails. A desk May provided from
work, and a steel lamp to put on it. (This oaken thing, with a hidden
typewriter table that pulled out and sprang into rigidity with a snap, a
secret cash drawer within a drawer—it was the first item of furniture
Prosper recognized as his own, as in fact him in another mode; it
appeared in his dreams for years, altered as he was himself.)
Mert and Fred didn’t appear for this job themselves (they disdained
and shrank from the women as much as the women did from them),
but eventually a couple of fellows in derbies and collarless shirts arrived
in a horse-drawn van and unloaded a cheap and vulgar but serviceable
and brand-new set of furniture of the right type, don’t ask how
acquired, and swapped it for Bea’s and May’s parents’ old moveables,
which they carted away without a word.
“Why don’t you like Uncle Mert and Uncle Fred?” Prosper asked
them as he ate the egg they cooked him every morning, themselves
taking nothing but coffee.
The two turned toward each other, that wide-eyed how-shall-we-
respond look he’d seen before, then to Prosper again.
“First of all,” May said, “they aren’t really your uncles. Mert’s your
mother’s cousin, and I don’t even know what Fred is.”
Prosper didn’t know why that would exclude them from the wom-
en’s world, and spooned the orange yolk from his egg. Now and then
when he’d walked out with his father, he’d been taken into a diner or a
garage to meet the two men, and those three had smoked a cigar
together and talked of matters Prosper didn’t understand, his father
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 141
laughing with them and at the same time somehow shy and cautious,
as though in their debt. He wondered now.
“They hang around down with that icehouse gang,” May said.
“You don’t want to know.”
But he did. Icehouse?
“They’re not bad, ” Bea said, always ameliorative. “It’s not that we
don’t like them. It’s just.”
“They have their uses,” May said regally, and she and Bea laughed
together.
Their place was too small to fit a wheelchair in, even if they could
have afforded one, but May had a wheeled office chair, a model 404D,
the Steno Deluxe, sent over from the business, and Prosper got good at
navigating the space of the downstairs in it, moving quickly hand over
hand from chair back to door frame to dresser like Tarzan sailing
through the jungle on his vines. The women had to roll up and put
away the rug, the beautiful Chinese rug, for him. Prosper only later
understood how many such things they did, how many little costs they
bore, all willingly paid. He had set them a problem, and they would
solve it: for a time, they had to think up something new almost every
day, and Prosper would try it, and at day’s end they’d congratulate
themselves and Prosper that that was done—Prosper had taken a bath
and got out by himself, Prosper had been taken to the hospital for the
sores on his feet, Prosper was going to go to school—and the next day
face another.
They got him to school with the help of Mary Mack, who knocked
one day at the door, appearing like the Marines (May said), face shin-
ing, having lost track of her client when he left the hospital—no one
had told her! She invited May and Bea to share her astonishment at
this, though they knew (and knew Miss Mack knew) that it was they
themselves who had told no one that Prosper had got out—but well!
Back again now, offering help, kidding Prosper (mute with bliss to be
in her radiance again) about playing hooky. Yes of course he’d go to