school. A few years back the progressives on the school board had
passed a resolution, and the city an ordinance, stating that every child
capable of being educated in the public schools ought to be, and accom-
modations must be made in the school, or at home for those unable to
reach the school. And Miss Mack knew that the school to which Pros-
142 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
per would now be going had set up a special classroom that the cripples
and wheelchair-bound children could reach. There was a sort of ramp,
she said, such as wheelbarrows or hand trucks might use, and once
inside there were no stairs to climb. Prosper had kept up with his les-
sons while in the hospital, hadn’t he? Well his teachers would decide
when he got there whether to advance him or keep him back. And how
(May and Bea almost in unison asked) was he to get to and from this
school? Miss Mack drew from her belted black leather satchel the
papers for May or Bea to sign, Prosper’s guardians as they now were or
would become, so that Prosper could ride the special bus that would go
around the district for the children who could not walk to school.
“I could walk,” Prosper said with offhand certainty.
“It’s a long way,” said Mary Mack. She looked long into Prosper’s
eyes, and he looked into hers, deep dark blue and larger than seemed
possible, somehow in his gazing absorbing her divinity unmediated.
“Maybe you should save your strength.”
“All right,” Prosper said, unreleased.
“At first, anyway,” said Mary Mack.
“All right,” Prosper said.
So when September came, there Prosper would go, and what would
come of that the women tried to imagine—how he would be regarded,
whether kindly or disdainfully, and how he would get on included with
a classful of children in his own case or maybe worse—but they couldn’t
imagine, really, and Fenix all that summer was dull or hostile, unre-
sponsive, maybe jealous of the new child in the family.
Bea and May usually spent their week’s vacation at a modest resort
in the mountains, eating vegetarian meals and doing exercises under
the instruction of a swami, but this year they saw that they’d have to be
right there in their own hot house, which they hoped wasn’t a sign of
things to come for them. They played Hearts and cribbage and they
listened to the radio and brought home books for Prosper from the
library. Carefully, one of them on each side of him, they took walks
around the block, returning in a sweat and feeling as though they’d
walked every step of the way in his braces themselves. Once in the
humid night May wept in Bea’s arms, and couldn’t say why: at the
change in their lives that would be forever, at that poor child’s losses,
at his heartbreaking good cheer, at everything.
5
Sometime late in that summer, Prosper made a discovery: his mother
and father were kept in the house, in the big closet under the stair.
Curious and aimless in the hot afternoon, he’d started open-
ing doors and peeking into drawers, learning the place, and this
one last: that smaller-than-normal door, the door with the angular top,
many a house he’d live in afterward would have one, and he’d always
find them sinister. And in there in the dusty shadows, amid the boxes
and a fur coat and a busted umbrella, stood or sat the great gray
Hoover vacuum cleaner his mother had pushed and pulled all morning
twice a week. It was the same one: there was the scar mended with
thread where once the bag had caught on a protruding banister nail
and torn. And close beside it, matrimonially close, his father’s two
leather sample cases, still shut up, buckled and strapped, just as they
had been in the closet beneath the stair in his old home.
Prosper slid from his rolling chair to the floor and crept into the
closet, just far enough so that he could snag one of the cases; he dragged
it out, feeling as though it might have grabbed him instead and pulled
him in. It was heavier than he would have thought, too heavy almost to
carry, and his father had carried both, at least from cab to train sta-
tion, station to hotel, up the stairs of businesses where he talked to
prospects. Prosper knew about that. But somehow he had never known
144 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
just what it was his father had sold. The story about selling, about car-
rying and talking and traveling, didn’t include that; or if it had, it
hadn’t been anything he could speculate about, objects or matter only
usable in the grown-up world, in business, none of his business though.
He tugged at the straps, which had first to be pulled tighter in order to
be released; when they were undone the catch on the top could be
unsnapped, and then the case fell into two, all revealed. In the pockets
and holders and clips were paints in lead tubes, and brushes in gradu-
ated sizes, beautiful pencils not yellow but emerald green, tucked into
a looped belt like cartridges. In other compartments or layers, small
pads and sheets of differing papers coarse to smooth. A case of pen
nibs, all different, from hairstreak-fine to broad as chisels. Other pens
whose use he couldn’t grasp, elaborate heavy compasses, a dozen tools
even more obscure. A thick catalog that showed all those things and
also drafting tables, T squares, cyclostyle machines, airbrushes, gray
pictures of gravely smiling men in bow ties using them.
Commercial Artist’s Supplies was what he sold. The name of the
company and his father’s were on the cards tucked into a special holder
at the case’s top. Prosper could feel the raised lettering on the card
under his finger, as though the words were made of black paint drib-
bled on with supernal precision. Cable COMARTSCO. The second
case, when in a state of strange excitement he extracted and opened it
too, contained more and different things, including three boxes of col-
ored pencils of the kind Bea and May had given him, each full of pen-
cils in more exquisitely graduated colors. For an instant he heard his
father’s voice.
He restored the contents as carefully as he could, shut them up, and
pushed them back beneath the stair beside the Hoover. For a couple of
days he said nothing, at once elated and oppressed by his discovery;
but then, at dinner, he slyly turned the topic to his father and his work,
those big cases he used to carry, what were those? And his aunts both
jumped up at once, went to pull the cases out, glad for him, glad he had
thought of them, glad he wanted to look into them, go ahead! Bea
pulled out from one of the nested compartments a paper book called
Teach Yourself Commercial Art & Studio Skills, and Prosper accepted
it from her with a turn of his heart and a warmth in his throat he
hadn’t known before.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 145
So the great cases went into his room. Bea and May said that the
company’d asked for them back but Prosper’s mother’d never got to it,
and it seemed they’d sent an angry letter while she was in the hospital,
and then they’d quietly gone out of business themselves. If Prosper
wanted a T square and a board they’d have to find them elsewhere.
Meanwhile the women had to return to work, and it was just too
hard to bear thinking of him all alone in the house, for he couldn’t be
a latchkey child, couldn’t run to the park or hop on the streetcar to the
natatorium (they were sure of that). So they asked around the neigh-