the Wet Mae Murray, a tricky finger wave that May mastered, making
an effort out of fellow-feeling with poor Mae, the Hollywood castoff.
“You can teach this old dog new tricks,” she said.
Prosper was a part of this plan, the other important part, it was the
hope of solving two problems at once that had given Bea and May the
energy to carry it out. He was eighteen; without any high school and
his physical limitations, work at home was the best he could just now
aim for (“just now” was Bea’s addition to this judgment, the future
ever unknowable but dimly bright to Bea). He’d been making some-
thing with his artwork, engrossing documents and signs that said con-
gratulations or welcome home or other things, lettering price
cards for the butcher whose meat he bought; and of course he’d kept
house for the absent women, a job that now didn’t need doing.
162 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
So he’d go into business with them. He began by making the posters
to be put up on the telephone poles around the neighborhood, and the
little ad they placed after much thought in the evening paper—“Bring
out your BEST and do it for LESS.” He made their sign too—an old
cupboard door lovingly enameled and varnished.
“May, look at this! This boy’s a genius! So artistic!”
The Mayflower was the name they had chosen, arching over a some-
what emblematic flower and its visiting bee, a notion of Fenix Vigaron’s.
Beauty Salon with a dot between each letter and the next, elongating
the phrase elegantly, and an arrow pointing down to the door in the
alley, opened now and painted.
“Our shingle,” May said and laughed. They hung it up on the house
corner, and toasted it and themselves with a ruby glass of schnapps.
The shop began to do business, but only after a month or so of wait-
ing, Bea and May dressed and ready every morning like hosts in that
anxious hour when it seems no guests at all will show up. There were a
couple of early mistakes, money refunded, free services offered in com-
pensation and indignantly refused—Bea and May in the withering gaze
of an enraged matron, Bea offering soothe and May ready to give the
old bat an earful but smiling on. Bea’s skills and generous approbation
brought women back and back, and others were drawn in by May’s
hints of her connections beyond this plane of existence (she tried hard
not to make too much of this, but the stories she heard as women soaked
their nails in soapy water or sat beneath the penitential dryer were too
intriguing not to report to her spirit guide; May delivered Fenix’s gnomic
responses to the women but refused to explicate them, which only made
May seem the more privy to secret wisdom). Things got pretty busy.
“Prosper,” Bea said to him as she cleaned the shop at day’s end.
“Yes.” He looked up from the old copy of The Sunny Side he was
reading. The Sunny Side was the official publication of the American
Optimists Association. Bea took the magazine, read it faithfully, and
they piled old copies here for clients. Bea was an Optimist.
“We’re thinking,” Bea said, “that you can be more help in the
shop.”
“Sure,” Prosper said. He closed the picture-less little magazine. The
motto of the AOA, printed beneath the title, was Every day, in every
way, I’m getting better and better. Émile Coué.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 163
“There’s things you can’t do,” Bea said, standing tiptoe to lower
and lock the transom. “But also things you can.”
“Sure,” said Prosper. He straightened up, ready for his orders. What
could he do? Well, he could answer the phone and keep the appoint-
ments book, he could greet the customers as they arrived, keep things
orderly, just anything. Maybe—who knew—he could learn a bit of the
business, washing hair or similar. Lots of men did such work, the best
paid were men in fact, she could tell him.
“But now I have to tell you,” Bea said, tidying and fussing with her
back to him for so long that Prosper understood it was easier to say her
piece without facing him. “You’ll have to look nice. A nice clean shirt
and a tie. You’ll have to shave, you know, every day, and maybe a little
talcum. Tooth powder. I know the bath’s not easy for you, but.” Now
at last she did turn to him, beaming. “We’ll be so proud to have you!
Really!”
He could only beam back. He was possessed by the ticklish feeling of
having been seen, of understanding that he could be seen by others, who
passed certain judgments or came to certain opinions about him because
they saw not the inside of himself that he saw but the outside, where the
face he couldn’t see and the smells of himself and the smuts and the
wrinkles on him (that he inside could always account for or discount)
came first, first and foremost. He remembered his father at the nightly
labor of polishing his narrow shoes, instructing Prosper that one day
he’d know how important it was, and why. Bring out your best.
“All right,” he said.
From that day forward he did take an interest in himself, studying
the image in the mirror, not only the plastered hair and knotted tie (the
knot his own invention, as there was no one to instruct him in the
four-in-hand) but also the odd attraction in his own green eyes, a ques-
tion with no answer passing back and forth from him to it. Every day,
in every way, I’m getting better and better, he’d say softly. Bea was
astonished at the change, his going from indifference to punctilious
attention, but it was only that he hadn’t known, no one had explained
to him you could take yourself in hand this way, as though you were a
pot to be polished or a garden to be weeded.
He delighted in the shop, the women who came and went; he greeted
each by name and made some remark pertinent to her, asked about her
164 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
poodle or her daughter in business school or her ailing husband. They
lost one or two customers repelled by Prosper’s clattering around the
shop still painfully bent, but he won the loyalty of others. His lacks
and inabilities made them want to mother him, no surprise really, espe-
cially when they learned he had no real mother, was actually an
Orphan: but the same lacks and inabilities somehow allowed them to
be themselves in his presence, as they were in the shop with May and
Bea but weren’t with other men (he saw how they could change when,
as now and then happened, a husband poked his head into the shop to
pick one of them up—they’d switch in a moment to a guarded, prac-
ticed manner, even if it was a seemingly childish or dizzy one. And
only he knew). He listened to their stories just as Bea and May did, and
listened to the wisdom his aunts dispensed. He saw tears, more than
once; overheard a shocking cynicism too. He gets nothing from me in
that bed but once a month. And he’d better make it worth my while,
I’m telling you.
He supplemented what he learned with his reading, after May began
stocking old copies of True Story magazine she got from a younger
cousin. When the shop was quiet and his tasks done, Prosper sat by the
extension phone and read them. I Married a Dictator. Aren’t there
limits to what a woman will stand, even for such a mad infatuation as