received as much benefit from education as he was ever likely to use—
enough to get a job if he could hold one, and if he couldn’t, more than
he needed.
So he was on his own. With Bea and May he worked out a schedule,
which May typed up at work—Prosper’s name at the top of the sheet
all in capitals, entrancing somehow. From eight to nine, he was to clean
his room and as much of the rest of the house as he could manage;
from nine to ten, physical exercise, as prescribed by the hospital,
including stretching a big rubber band as far and in as many directions
as he could. Ten till noon, reading and similar pursuits. Lunch, and so
on. In the afternoon, practice his art skills; walk to the corner store if
the weather was all right, carrying the string bag, and bring back
necessities for dinner. May started instructing him in cooking, and
within a few months he was regularly making dinner for them, maca-
roni, cutlets, potatoes with Lucky corned beef from a can, an apron
around his middle and spoon in his hand. When they tired of his
152 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
menus, May taught him something new out of the greasy and spine-
broken cookbook.
Prosper thought getting on with his education would be a simple
matter. The People’s Cyclopedia, with many pearly illustrations that he
liked to look at and even touch—the Holy Land, Thomas Edison in his
laboratory, the Russian Fleet at Port Arthur, the Three Graces by
Canova. He’d just start with volume I and read through to the end. The
three naked Graces, holding one another in languid arms and touching
as though comforting or merely enjoying one another, were in C, for
Canova, the sculptor. Halfway through that first volume ( Bulbul, Bul-
garia) he gave up. There was a Bible on the same shelf, and since it at
least was only one volume he decided to start on that instead. No one in
his family had cared much about church, though Prosper’d been told to
answer Protestant when asked what religion he was. There was supposed
to be a minister among the ancestors on one side of the family, and at
least one Jew on the other, and they seemed to cancel out, at once fulfill-
ing the family’s religious obligations and nullifying them. Prosper asked
Bea, as he was beginning his new enterprise, if she believed in God.
“Of course I do,” she said. She was cleaning the polish from her
nails. “What do you take me for?”
“Jesus too?”
“Sure.” She hadn’t looked up from her nails. As an answer to his
question this seemed definite but not definitive, and he couldn’t think
of another. He went on reading, turning the crinkly translucent pages,
but grew increasingly mystified after the first familiar stories (familiar
but not quite identical to the ones he knew or would have said he
knew). He made his way through the rules of Deuteronomy, wondering
if anyone had ever really followed them all and what kind of people
those would be; and he came upon this:
When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the
Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou
hast taken them captive, and seest among the captives a beauti-
ful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have
her to thy wife; Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house,
and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; And she shall
put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 153
thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month:
and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and
she shall be thy wife. And it shall be, if thou have no delight in
her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt
not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of
her, because thou hast humbled her.
He was alone in the house, winter coming on and the lone lightbulb
that May allowed to be lit dull and somehow melancholy in its inade-
quacy. Prosper thought: I wouldn’t put her out. He’d explain the rule,
that she had to shave her head and take off her clothes, but it wasn’t his
rule, just the rule. He supposed he couldn’t tell her he was sorry about
destroying her city and killing her people, since the Lord said to do it,
and it had to be all right. But he wouldn’t put her out, not if she was
that beautiful to begin with. I won’t put you out, he’d say to her. You
can stay as long as you want. She’d have to and she’d want to, he was
sure. She’d stay with him in his tent, naked inside with him, and she’d
get over her grief.
He closed the perfumey-smelling Bible and went to get the first
volume of the Cyclopedia, to look up C for Canova.
Meanwhile things just kept getting worse, although (as the Presi-
dent had said, standing in his top hat high up on the Capitol steps) the
worst thing about it sometimes was just the fear, the fear that you’d
lose your grip on the rung you’d got to and go down not only into pov-
erty but also shame. The women worried for Prosper, how he’d ever
make out, and they were right to worry, because the margin for him
was thin, and in that time there were many whose thin margins, the
thinnest of margins, just evaporated. It happened every day.
It might be that May and Bea conceived that Charlie Coutts would
never want or need to use that telephone number that May’d given
him, not that she was being insincere or hypocritical when she did so,
it had just been one of those moments of sudden fellow-feeling that are
forgotten about as soon as made. And she had forgotten it when the
’phone rang in the house and May tried to figure out who was on the
line, which was hard because that person—it was Charlie’s father—
didn’t have either of the women’s names, which Charlie hadn’t remem-
bered, though he’d kept hold of the number.
154 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
When they’d straightened that out, Mr. Coutts said that Charlie
had been thinking of Prosper (he said “Proctor” at first) and had always
been grateful for how Prosper had befriended him in the hospital, and
wanted to ask if Prosper could come visit someday, at his convenience.
In a rush—maybe making up for her initial coldness to someone she’d
thought was a stranger or maybe a crank caller—May said sure, of
course, and even issued a counter-invitation, maybe Charlie could
come and visit at Prosper’s house: an invitation Mr. Coutts quickly and
with what seemed profound gratitude accepted, somewhat surprising
May, who didn’t try to take it back though. Charlie and his father lived
in a far part of town, and May—in for a penny, in for a pound—said
that Charlie was welcome to stay the night if that was more conve-
nient; and she hung up in a state of apprehension and gratified benevo-
lence.
Prosper felt a little the same. “Swell,” he said when Bea told him.
“When’s he coming?”
“Next Saturday,” Bea said.
“Swell.”
“Don’t say swell, Prosper. It’s so vulgar.”
His father brought Charlie in an old heap of a car, which drove past
the house and then, as though becoming only slowly conscious of the
address it had passed, cycled back to park against the far curb. Char-