cigar smoke, girlie calendars, spiked orders growing yellow with age,
freshly cracked decks of cards, ringing phones Mert talked into two at
a time even while calling for Fred to deal with this or that matter.
Whatever matter it was that Mert and Fred had come to talk to May
and Bea about had gone no further that night; the men went away with
a mission, to take (as Mert said) the boy in hand, and teach him a few
things; and Prosper’s world widened. Later on he’d think that May and
168 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Bea must have felt abandoned by him, and must have resented if not
hated it that he’d taken up with the icehouse gang, and he’d feel shame,
but not then: too much that was new and gratifying came his way, and
more lay just beyond envisioning. He started smoking, not Mert’s
Dutch Masters or Muniemakers but the more fastidious cigarette,
though he found it hard to smoke and walk at the same time, and even-
tually mostly gave it up; he grew a mustache, a thin dark line above his
lip like Ronald Colman’s. The uncles gave him instruction in the arts
of shaking hands and looking a man in the eye, what honor required
you to do and what (they thought) it didn’t, what was owed to friends
and how to look out for Number One at the same time. They made
over his clothes: dressed him not as they themselves dressed, though
they got a tailor to make him a good suit, but as the young blades
nowadays dressed: sport coats of houndstooth or herringbone collared
like shirts rather than lapelled, pastel shirts worn with hand-painted
silk foulards or without a tie, long collar points laid over the jacket.
Trousers richly pleated and draped—Prosper’s braces disappeared
beneath them rather than poking everywhere through the fabric like a
bony beast’s joints. He studied himself in the mirror, considering how
his new pale wide fedora should lie, back like Bing’s or Hoagy’s, or
forward and nearly hiding an eye, mystery man or secret agent, pinch
the front indents to lift it to a lady. Not much could be done with his
shoes, to which the braces were bolted across the instep, but no reason
he couldn’t wear silk socks in argyle patterns or clocked with roses;
Prosper, lifting the knees of his cheviot bags to sit, could glimpse them,
pretty secrets revealed.
They kidded him too about what else they might do for him, take
him out to the suburbs to a certain place, or downtown to one, get his
cherry picked or his ashes hauled, saying it maybe only to laugh at the
face he made—wide-eyed, that grin he was given to that they couldn’t
wipe. That was just joking, but Fred, late one night with half a bottle
gone between them, gave Prosper a lot of corrective information he’d
maybe soon need to know—Fred had ascertained, interested in the
topic, that Prosper’s weakness only reached a ways above his knees, so
though it was maybe unlikely for someone like him, the Scout’s motto
was Be Prepared. But how, Prosper asked—hilariously muzzy-mouthed,
and not sure what had brought this forth—how, when his own part
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 169
rose at that specific angle so purposefully, was he supposed to get it
into a girl, whose slot or cleft (he was thinking of Canova, of Mary
Wilma) ran, well, sort of the other way or seemed to, crosswise, opening
inward and running through toward the back? Didn’t it? So how was
he supposed to, was he supposed to bend, or? No no no, Fred said, you
got it wrong, the thing you see when you look at her, the slot or slit
there, that ain’t the thing at all, no kid, that’s just what shows. The
thing you need’s down underneath, see—and here Fred lifted his own
big knees and thighs to his chest to illustrate, poking at a spot amid the
creases of his trousers. There, just ahead of the other hole, and it runs
up up up, just right, trust Mother Nature, she ain’t going to make it
hard to get into. You got that? You need another drink?
He learned just as much, or at least heard as much and remembered
it, listening to his uncles talk during the day at business as he sat at a
desk they’d rigged for him and did work they thought up for him.
“You speak to that woman on Wentworth?” Mert said. “The new
tenant, the bakery?”
“Funny story,” Fred said grinning. “Yeah, I talked to her. Single
woman. She was real jittery about the health department inspector
coming. I says, It’s nothing. You wait for him to make his inspection,
be nice, keep a ten in your hand. He might find a couple things, so you
say—I told her—you say Well all that’s going to be hard to fix, isn’t
there some other way we can handle this? And he might say no, or he
might say Well, maybe, and you say Oh swell, and you shake hands,
and the ten passes. Okay?”
Mert pushed back in his swivel chair, listening, already grinning as
though he expected what would come next.
“So she had the inspection, and I asked her how did it go, and she
says not so good. I ask her, did she do what I said? What did she tell
him? And turns out what she said was, Well this is going to be expen-
sive, isn’t there something I can do for you? Jesus, she says it took her
a half hour to get rid of the guy after that, and he was so pissed off he
wouldn’t take her ten.”
“Send her over to Bill and Eddy,” Mert said. “They’ll fix it for
her.” Bill and Eddy, attorneys-at-law, did a certain amount of work
for the icehouse gang; Mert often got his own stories from meetings
with the two.
170 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Attorney Bill,” he told them with mock gravity, “defending a man
charged with verbally molesting a woman. So Bill’s known this fellow
a while, he’s not surprised. Tells me how he’ll be in a tavern at the bar
with him, they see a nice skirt go by outside; this fellow pops out, has
a few words with the woman, she turns away, he comes back in. Did he
know her? Nah—just liked her looks. So what did he say to her? He
asked her if she’d like to have a lay with him. She said no. Bill tells me
he does that a lot. Always nice and polite, and a tip of the hat for a No.
I said no wonder he’s got in trouble—he must get his face slapped a lot
at least. Oh, Bill says, he does—and he gets laid a lot too.”
“So this time he asked the wrong dame,” said Fred. He put his hand
by his mouth: “Call for Bill and Eddy.”
“Turns out there was a beat cop twirling his nightstick just about
within earshot. Never mind. They’ll get him out of it. Told me the
lady’s already looking sorry she brought the charges. Who knows,
maybe this guy’ll get her in the end.”
The firm of Bill and Eddy (it was George Bill and Eustace Eddy,
Prosper would learn in time) set up the papers that created and dis-
solved a number of enterprises operated out of the icehouse—Prosper’s
first job there was making up stationery for a warehousing and fulfil-
ment business they’d begun. The uncles had also got into the vending
machine business, which besides a string of Vendorlators dispensing
candy and smokes and Pepsi-Cola around the West Side included a few
semilegal “payout” pinball machines as well. Prosper was sent out on
the truck that filled and serviced the machines. Mostly it was his job to
sit in the big doorless truck and see that nobody stole the cartons of
cigarettes and boxes of Collie bars and Zagnuts. Now and then he was
allowed out to have a coffee in a diner while Roy the serviceman broke