borhood for someone who might be induced to come and visit him,
play Parcheesi in the cool of the darkened house, draw and paint, sit on
the porch and drink Coca-Cola; and because they were the persons
they were they didn’t think not to accept when a neighbor lady in pity
assigned her daughter, a year and more older than Prosper, to do this
service. And because Prosper was coming to be the person he was, he
made no objection.
Her name was Elaine, dark and soft; strangely slow and languid she
seemed to Prosper, her fingers moving more tentatively or cautiously to
do any task than his would: he would watch fascinated as she opened a
box of crackers or brought forward her skirt from behind her as she sat.
“What happened to you?” she asked when the grown-ups had all
left them. He had got on his braces to meet her.
“I fell out of an airplane,” Prosper said. He’d had no idea he would
say that until he heard it. “I’ll probably get better.”
She seemed not to hear it anyway. She went on looking at the steel
bars that came out from Prosper’s pant legs and went underneath his
shoes.
“Would you like a soda pop?” he asked. He couldn’t perceive that
she heard this either. Prosper, who was stared at a lot by different
people in different ways, was learning methods of distracting their
gaze, bringing it up to his face, even throwing it off him. Elaine’s he
seemed not to be able even to pull up. It wasn’t one of the usual faces
Prosper knew (but as yet had no name for, couldn’t say he knew): it
wasn’t the cheerful I-see-nothing-out-of-the-way one, or the repelled-
but-fascinated one, or the poor-animal-in-trouble one (head tilted, eyes
big with pity). Elaine just looked, and went on looking. After a time
she arose, in her unwilled way, and came to where he stood. He was
146 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
unsure what she intended; should he step away? Was she headed for
another room, the door out, did she mean to bean him? He’d never
seen such an unknowable face. She stopped before him and squatted.
He stood still. She lifted up the cuff of his trouser to see the shaft of the
brace.
“How high up do they go?”
“Here.” He touched his thigh. She looked up to where he touched,
then at his face, and then, as though snapping out of something, she
stood, turned, and walked away, and proposed a game, and said the
African violets needed watering, and that she herself would be entering
the eighth grade come September, and so went on talking for much of
the day in a steady soft uncrossable stream.
The next day when she came he was sitting in his office chair. He
hadn’t been able to remember, when he woke, what she looked like,
but now he could see that what made her face confusing was the way
her eyebrows were made, lifting up from their outer edges toward the
middle, as though she were perpetually asking a question.
“Why aren’t you wearing those things?”
“The braces? They’re hot. This is easier. Would you like a soda
pop?”
She stood regarding him without responding, listening maybe to
her own thoughts. Looking around in her slow absent-watchful way
she saw his braces, propped against his bed in the parlor he occupied.
She went in, and he followed on the chair. She squatted before the
braces as she had before Prosper, and examined with her slow fingers
the leather straps, the metal bars, the pad that covered his knee.
“Do they hurt?” she said.
“No. They make you sweat. You have to wear long socks. Stocki-
nette.”
“Stockinette,” she said, as though she liked the word. “Are they
hard to put on?”
“Not for me.”
“Let me see.”
“Okay,” he said. Who would have thought someone would ask him
that? But he didn’t mind; it was about his only trick. He slid from the
wheeled chair and to the floor. “I have to take my trousers off,” he said.
Without getting up, Elaine turned herself around. Prosper worked
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 147
off his pants where he sat, and took the long tubes of stockinette from
the bed where he’d tossed them. Elaine, who had been peeking around
to see, now turned, too fascinated not to. Prosper worked the long
stockings up over his legs, then took one of the two frames, lifted his
leg with his hands and fitted it inside. Then the other. He worked his
feet into the Buster Browns that were attached at the bottoms. He
wished it didn’t take so long, he’d like to speed through it like charac-
ters in movie cartoons can do, a momentary blur of activity and it’s
done. He began the buckling, and Elaine came closer.
“Do they have to be tight?”
“Oh yes,” he said. When his shoes were tied he said, “Now watch
this.” He reached out for a crutch, also propped there by the bed, rolled
himself to his side, and with a hand on the floor pushed himself up,
then pulled up farther on the crutch’s crossbar till he was standing up.
“See? Easy.”
“You didn’t put your pants on.”
“Oh. I usually do.” He laughed, but she didn’t; once again she
seemed to remember herself, rose and left the room, and when he had
got the braces off and his pants on again he found her primly seated in
the window seat with a magazine.
Since she evidently liked him better when his braces were on, he
was careful to wear them for her visits, but it somehow didn’t seem to
win her, and he wanted to win her, trying various blandishments that
she seemed to have little interest in, or scorned as childish. She was
restless, bored, irritable, he knew it but couldn’t fix it. On an after-
noon hotter than any before, hottest in history but probably not as hot
as tomorrow or the next day would be, she was staring at him in some
dissatisfaction where he stood.
“Let’s pretend,” she said. “Let’s pretend that it’s me who needs
them and you don’t.”
“What?”
“The braces. Let’s pretend.”
He didn’t play let’s-pretend any longer, and not only because he’d
had no one to play with. Somehow that mode or way of being had been
left behind, in the world before the hospital, where he was not now.
“Why do you want to do that?”
“Let’s just,” she said.
148 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Her unsad sadness. It was those strange eyebrows, maybe, surely.
“Okay,” he said.
“Take them off.”
“Okay.”
Okay: so that’s what they did, that day and each hot day after that:
she would sit on the floor of his room, take off her shoes and stockings,
push up her skirt, pull on the stockings he used, and buckle on his
braces. She was older than he but about the same height, and her legs
were not much longer than his. He buckled them for her at first but she
said he never did it tight enough. Then they sat together and played
Parcheesi or drew with the art supplies and ate crackers until she went
home. She never tried standing. He never learned what it was she
wanted from them, and she said nothing more, but when she wore
them she seemed at once content and turbulent, and within the circle of
her swarming feelings he felt that too. It all stopped one day when May
came home ill from work, and found Elaine with Prosper’s braces on,
her skirt hiked up to her waist (she liked to look down at them often as
she read or played), and Prosper without his pants on (for he’d taken
them off to surrender the braces to her). May was generous about many
things, a taker of the Long View, but this fit nowhere in her picture of