“Going to the movies?” Mert said. “Man of leisure?”
That required a dignified silence.
“What’s playing?” Fred asked.
“Dunno.”
They turned on Main. The theater was a ways from Bea and May’s,
but Prosper’d done it before. Late on a winter afternoon and no one
much going in. Fred let the car idle there—no one would be doing
much of that from then on. The marquee advertised No Room at the
Inn along with The Invisible Agent, newsreels and Selected Short
Subjects.
184 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“You’re a good kid, Prosper,” Mert said. He pulled out a money clip
and plucked a couple of bills from it, then one more. “You do what you
think you got to.”
Prosper shook Mert’s hand, then reached over and shook Fred’s. He
got out of the car with the usual clatter of braces and crutches. Hadn’t
they themselves, his uncles, taught him what Honor required? Wasn’t
it this? And what the heck was he going to do now to make money?
The second feature was just beginning when he entered into that
soothing darkness, violet hued, lit by the shifting scenes bright and
dim. He paused at the top of the long flight of broad steps—easy
enough to manage but not if you couldn’t see them; the usher, silhou-
etted against the huge heads on the screen, was showing someone to a
seat, momentary ghost of a flashlight pointed discreetly downward.
Prosper waited for him to come back up and light his way.
But it wasn’t a him—it was an usherette, as they were called, women
and girls taking the jobs of drafted boys, solemn in her big dark uni-
form. Tumble of black curls beneath her cap. She turned on the dim
flashlight and was about to walk him down when he stepped forward,
Swing Gait, and she halted: then, surely a breach of the usher’s code,
she lifted the light right up to his face.
“Prosper?” she whispered.
Blinded, he still knew whose voice he’d heard. The soft dry burr of
it. She lowered the lamp, but he stood dazzled. She touched his arm
and turned him away from the screen and back out toward the foyer.
“Prosper,” she said again when they were in the light.
“Hi, Elaine.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
She gazed upon him. “I haven’t seen you.”
“I’m around. The same place.”
“I moved out,” she said. “Things happened. I have a room.”
“Okay.”
“Who did that to your hair?”
“What? Oh.”
That face, the eyebrows lifting in a worried query that she seemed
already to know the sad answer to—Is it mortal? Will we never
return? Is all lost?—when she wasn’t actually asking anything and
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 185
wasn’t sad. “Listen,” she said. “I get off in an hour. Sit in the back.
I’ll see you then.”
As though they’d agreed to this a long time ago. That was the sign,
he was as yet unused to noticing it but he was learning: that sensation
that the future has already happened and is only bringing itself about
in staging these present moments.
He went back in and sat down. He lit a cigarette, after determining
that a little ashtray was attached to the seat in front of him: one thing
hard for him was stamping out a burning end from a seated position.
The picture was well under way now. The grandson of the original
Invisible Man had inherited his grandfather’s secret formula, and the
Nazis and the Japs were teamed up to steal it. The Invisible Agent pes-
ters and pulls funny tricks on the bad guys; the audience watched in
silence. It occurred to Prosper that the Agent must be damn cold—only
without his clothes was he altogether invisible.
Elaine went past the row where he sat, a woman and a man in tow.
An invisible woman, that would be an idea for a picture. Naked,
and you’d know it, but you’d see nothing.
He thought of Elaine, in his braces, on the floor of his aunts’ house.
Exchange of selves, his for hers, why would she have wanted that? And
why his? However many eyes there were on him every day as he did
this or that, walked a block, took a stool in a diner, went through a
door, he often felt himself to be invisible. Like the Invisible Agent:
people could see the suit and hat and gloves, and nothing of what was
inside them. No matter that they stared.
He felt her slide into the seat behind him. “I’m off,” she whispered,
leaning over. “Come with me. I have to change.”
Making as little noise as he could, he stood and left the row to
follow her; the few in adjoining rows glancing up with interest, maybe
one or two thinking he was being expelled, no cripples allowed. He
went after her into the foyer and around to the far side and through a
door that seemed to be just part of the wall. It opened to a hot shabby
corridor lit by bare bulbs. Dim hollow voices of the picture could be
heard . I pity the Devil when you Nazis start arriving in bunches!
“Here,” she said.
It was a dressing room, a couple of blank lockers, a sink, a clothes
rack of pipe where uniforms hung. Steam hissed from the radiator. She
186 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
turned her back to him to take out the stud from her collar, then pulled
the whole celluloid shirtfront with collar and tie attached out from her
uniform jacket and tossed it down on a bench.
“Elaine,” he said, and she turned to him; he could see that she’d
worn nothing beneath the dickie, too hot maybe. As though he’d said
much more than her name she came to him, and he knew it was time to
put his arms around her, but that was hard; propping himself with one
crutch he wrapped her in the other arm, still holding its crutch. She
somehow melted into him anyway, partly supporting him, breasts soft
against him. Then she seemed not to know what came next, forgetting
or unable to predict, and she drew away, undoing the frogs of her uni-
form coat.
“Turn around,” she said, and he did; when after a time he turned
back he found she had put on a shirtwaist dress, was barelegged in
white anklets, and he felt a piercing loss. She put on a dark thick coat
and a shapeless hat. “We’ll go out the back.”
She took him out around the back of the stage, and for a moment
Prosper could see that the great screen was actually translucent, and
the picture of two lovers projected on the front shone through to be
seen, reversed, by no one.
They came out into the alley, scaring a lean cat from a garbage pail.
She lived many blocks away, in the opposite direction from Bea and
May’s. They didn’t speak much as they walked, just enough so as not to
appear strange to each other marching in urgent silence toward what-
ever it was, but what little from their shared past they might have spoken
about ought not to be said now: that was obvious to both of them.
“So what happens to the Jap? In that picture.”
“He commits Harry Carey.”
“Oh.”
Though the cold air burned his throat, he was wet with sweat
beneath his coat by the time she said “Here.” The place was heart-
sinkingly tall, a long pile of stairs with steeper than normal risers that
climbed as though up a castle wall to a front door high above. He
despaired. But Elaine then took him through a side gate (beware of
the dog) and around to the back, a short winter-dry yard where an
umbrella clothesline leaned like a blasted tree, and into a door. “Up,”
she said softly. “Don’t be loud.”