lie’s father, in a windbreaker jacket and hat, cigarette between his lips,
got out and went around to the passenger side to get Charlie out. Bea,
May, and Prosper watched from the house. Prosper remembered the
hospital, more clearly than he had before, when Charlie’s father lifted
him up with that careful love and both arms around him. He set him
down on the pavement. Then with a small grip in one hand and the
other on his son’s shoulder to keep him steady, he aimed Charlie at the
house. The three inside watched him come toward them, Charlie
resembling a man walking under water, seeming to spoon the air with
lifted arms to help push his knees up against some invisible pressure,
uncertain feet falling where they had to. His father bent down and said
something to him around the cigarette, and Charlie hearing it laughed,
head wagging in glee.
They came out onto the porch to greet Charlie, his father guiding
though not aiding him up the stairs. Only when he’d seen the boy to
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 155
the top did he take off his hat and greet the ladies and Prosper. He was
grateful for the invitation. Bea said that Charlie surely had grown, and
certainly he looked to her both larger and more hazardous than she’d
thought he’d be. May invited them both in, but Charlie’s father with a
quiet apology said he couldn’t: he was starting a new job, Swing Shift
at a plant, and didn’t dare take a chance of being late. The women
understood.
“Good-bye, son. Behave yourself.”
“Byda.”
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Charlie liked that joke.
“Charlie!” Prosper said. “Come in and see my art supplies.”
Charlie’s father with a last touch on his son’s shoulder turned to go,
and May stepped down off the porch with him.
“Now, Mr. Coutts, is there anything at all we should know, I mean
what is it we should, you know.”
“Oh he’s fine,” said the man, discarding the remnant of his ciga-
rette in the gutter. “He’ll not give any trouble. You might tuck a big
napkin in his shirt collar at dinner.” He smiled at May. “I’ll be back
tomorrow morning.”
Charlie’d gone into the house with a hand on Prosper’s shoulder.
Bea following after the two of them was made to think how large the
world is, and how little of it we see most of the time. When Prosper’d
got Charlie to his room and seated him on the bed, Bea put her head
around the corner and with a motion drew Prosper out.
“Won’t he need help?” she said. “You should offer him help.”
“No, Aunt Bea. He doesn’t need help. He can do everything fine.
He just has to go slow.”
“Well.” Bea glanced back into the room where Charlie sat, rocking
as though he heard a strange music, or as though now and then some
small invisible being poked him. “If he needs any help you just call.”
“All right.”
“And you give him any help he needs.”
“I will.”
“Don’t wait to be asked.”
“I won’t.”
The women left the boys alone.
156 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
They looked over Prosper’s art supplies, but Prosper, realizing they
weren’t much use to Charlie, shut them up again, and from the drawer
where they were kept brought out games, cribbage, checkers, that he’d
seen Charlie manage in the hospital. They talked about the hospital,
and all that they had shared then, the bedpans, the crutch racing, Nurse
Muscle Eenie—Charlie laughing as Prosper remembered him doing
back then, laughter that seemed to run riot throughout him, tugging
him this way and that so that Prosper watching him laughed harder
too even as he tried to pull out of Charlie’s orbit the game board or cup
of coffee that Charlie’s limbs threatened. Upstairs May and Bea lis-
tened to the hilarity and the banging of the braces and the furniture,
taking turns rising up in alarm and starting off to go see, till pulled
back by the other.
It actually fascinated Prosper how Charlie did things, as though he
were badly adapted to do many common tasks but had figured out by
long practice how to get them done. Once in the hospital a man had
come to entertain the children, a small man in a dress suit with a little
dog. The dog could do things you wouldn’t think his paws and teeth
could manage. While the man would pretend to be about to do a magic
trick or juggle some balls, the little dog would run behind him and pull
out the hidden scarves or cards from his pockets, nose open the secret
drawers of trick boxes when the man wasn’t looking, paw out the doves
from the man’s tall hat—he could do anything, so deft and alert to
select the moment when the man’s back was turned to spoil his tricks
(though of course that was the trick), looking up with wide eyes as the
man scolded him, then doing it again, so busy and satisfied and inno-
cent. That’s how it was watching Charlie sugar his coffee, or rub his
chin questioningly, or mark his cribbage score with a pencil.
When long after dinner May called down the stairs to order them to
turn off the radio and go to bed, Charlie went to the little grip his
father had brought, worked open its catches, and pulled out a pair of
gray cotton pajamas. He got into these, and Prosper into his, each using
his own method and each making fun of the other for his contrivances.
Prosper noted the knotted muscle in Charlie’s rump and the big testi-
cles too. In the bathroom they washed their faces and brushed their
teeth, Prosper in his office chair and Charlie gripping the sink and
wrestling with the brush as though it were a small animal that had got
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 157
him. Laughing more, they climbed together into the bed, and Prosper
pulled the string he had rigged up so he could shut off the light hanging
from the ceiling.
“So good night,” Prosper said.
“Ood nigh,” said Charlie. “Own ledda bebbugs buy.”
“Don’t let the bedbugs bite. Okay, Charlie.”
“Oh gay.”
“Anything else you need?” May’d told him not to wait to be asked.
“Anything else I can help you with?”
“Oh well,” Charlie said, and began a series of twitches that might
have been shy or apologetic, and his knees pushed the bedclothes
sharply up. “I woont mine few could hep me yerp aw.”
“What?”
Charlie was laughing, in embarrassment or maybe not—that’s what
this spiraling was. “I wool like you. To hep me. YERP AW.”
Prosper thought a moment, and got it. “Charlie! What?”
“Cmaw,” Charlie said sweetly. “Gme a hand.”
Now they were both laughing, but Charlie didn’t stop. It was appar-
ent that he meant it, and asked it as a favor. He’d kicked away the cov-
erlet, purposefully it now seemed. “Ow bowdid? Hey?”
“Well,” Prosper said. “Well all right.”
“Oh gay,” said Charlie. He now became a mass of excited ungov-
erned activity from head to foot; Prosper had to help him get his bot-
toms down. Charlie’s penis was already big, and bigger than Prosper
had expected, bigger than his own, which had got up in sympathy,
though Prosper kept his own pants on. It took a minute to figure how
to grasp the thing from a point out in front rather than behind where
he’d always been before, like trying to do something while looking
only in a mirror, they struggled this way and that before they hit a
rhythm, which Prosper now divined would be the hard part for Charlie
when alone, especially as they got going and like a caught piglet Char-