F O U R F R E E D O M S / 187
It was only a half-flight, though the banister was flimsy and the
steps mismatched. How her room was fitted onto or into the house in
front never came clear to him, though he tried later to draw a plan.
The door at the top of the stairs led into a minute kitchen no bigger
than a closet, and that to a bedroom. Elaine pulled a chain that lit a
green-shaded lamp above the dark bed.
She turned to him then. He was breathing hard from exertion, and
she seemed to be also, her mouth a little open and her face lifted to his.
Her eyes huge and certain. He would come to learn—he was learning
already—that these moments, different as each one was from all the
others, were all more like one another than they were like any in the
rest of his life: they were like the moment in some movies when a scene
changes in an instant from black and white into color, and everything
is the same but now this picture has become one of those rare ones that
are colored, it joins that richer life, and for a time you live in it, until
the gray real world comes back again.
Night. Negotiating in the dark the way out of her room and down the
half flight of treacherous stairs holding the splintery banister, knowing
there were things—tools, trash, boxes, a cat—he couldn’t see. He
bumped at length into the door outward, and pushed it open (beware
of that dog) and made it out to the street. He saw at the block’s end the
cigar store right where he remembered it being, where there would be a
telephone. Mert’s bills in his pocket, enough for a while, but not for
taxis every day. He felt a sudden anguish, he wanted to turn back now
and climb those stairs again, there was something left undone there or
not completed, it twisted within him painfully in the direction of her
room even as he pushed himself down the block: something he’d never
felt before, and seeming to be installed deeply now.
Why was she the way she was? Women with their clothes on could
be utterly unlike themselves when they were without them, even those
who were unwilling to take all or even most of them off, who made
him paw through the folds of fabric like an actor fumbling through a
stage curtain to come out and say something important. But none so
far had been as different as Elaine. She’d lain still as he unbuttoned her
buttons and his, mewing a little softly, a mewing that grew stronger
188 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
when he’d got her last garments off, hard to do with no help at all. She
lay still and naked then making that sound, as though something
dreadful were about to happen to her that she was powerless to resist;
she closed her eyes while he unbuckled his braces, she covered her eyes
even for a moment with her hands, and then remained still, tense as a
strung wire, while he attended to her. He tried to speak, tell her they
had to be you know careful, but she wouldn’t listen, drew him over
atop her, parting her legs and pressing him down. But once he had
gone in—swallowed up almost by the enveloping hot wetness—she
held him still so he wouldn’t move, made sounds of protest if he tried,
almost as though he hurt her, and herself lay unmoving too except for
small tremors that racked her, seemingly unwanted. He almost whis-
pered Hey what the heck Elaine to make her behave in some more
familiar way but actually could say nothing, and after what seemed a
very long time she lifted her legs and circled him tightly; she murmured
something as though to herself, a word or two, and he felt a sudden
sensation of being grabbed or enveloped from within as by a hand. It
was so startling and unlikely that he nearly withdrew, and did cry out,
and so did she, even as he was held and ejaculating. And at that she
began pushing him out and away, gently and then more forcefully;
when he was separated she rolled over so that she faced away from
him, and pulled the coverlet over herself.
Elaine? he’d said.
All right, she’d said, not turning back. Go away now, she’d said. I’ll
see you maybe at the theater tomorrow.
So.
He guessed that if she’d got herself knocked up today he’d have to
marry her. The cab he called rolled up to the door of the cigar store
where he stood next to a dour wooden Indian, and Prosper checked to
see if it was driven by that same old fool who’d once mocked him, but
of course it wasn’t. He’d marry her and somehow they’d live, maybe in
that tiny room. For an instant he knew it would be so and that he
wanted nothing more, and how could that be? How could it?
8
Without his uncles’ wages and the odd bill they’d slip him for
this or that ser vice, Prosper was back in the Mayflower, but
May and Bea couldn’t give him the money he needed if he
was going to be seeing Elaine: though she seemed to want
nothing from him, that only made him think she really did. So he went
to work for The Light in the Woods. They needed people. He didn’t
have much of a choice. At least it appeared he wouldn’t have to support
a wife and child: after an uneasy week (he was uneasy, she seemed
somehow bleakly indifferent) he knew that.
The Light in the Woods (Prosper’d first heard about it from Mary
Mack, and then from the teacher of his special class at school) had for
years been giving work to people with impairments who couldn’t com-
pete for jobs with other workers. They were blind or almost blind, they
were deaf or crippled or untrainable, they were spastics or aged alkies
with tremors. They were put to work making simple things like coco
matting or brushes, or they picked up and refurbished discarded cloth-
ing or toys or furniture for resale, packed boxes or did contract labor
assembling things for local factories—anything that almost anybody
could do but nobody could make a living doing. For years The Light in
the Woods had been losing work: in the Depression, standards had
changed about what jobs an able-bodied person would willingly do.
190 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Supported by charitable giving, they’d kept their workers on through
those years, guaranteeing them their fifty cents a day even when there
wasn’t much to do. Now business was booming again: there were sud-
denly lots of jobs that nobody would do who could do anything else. A
new age of junk had dawned; shortages of materials for war industries
meant we were constantly urged to save them, bring them to collection
centers for reuse and reclamation—rubber and scrap metal and fats
and tin cans (wash off the labels, cut off both ends and smash them
flat). Old silk stockings could be made into parachutes; new ones soon
became unavailable. Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without. In
Prosper’s city the collection and sorting of discards and donated matter
was contracted out to The Light in the Woods, and the outfit opened a
larger warehouse in the industrial district to handle it all. When Pros-
per made the trip downtown to the War Mobilization Employment
Office, that’s where he was sent. All he had to do was sign up for the
special bus service that The Light in the Woods had arranged to circle
the city and bring in their people who couldn’t get there on their own.
A special bus. A special card allowing him to ride it. A right to sur-
vive.
Prosper put down Elaine’s address as the one he’d need to be picked
up at. That seemed like killing a couple of birds with one stone, though
when he told her, her face didn’t seem to agree that it was birds he’d