killed.
“I can get them to come to my house instead,” he said.
“No it’s fine.”
“I mean if you.”
“It’s fine.”
“I’ll be gone early. The bus’ll stop at the corner. It’ll still be dark.
No one’ll notice.”
“All right.”
Was she displeased? He thought he knew by now something of what
women wanted or needed, what pleased them or most of them, but
somehow with her he could never tell, and suspected he hadn’t done
enough, or done the right thing; it irritated him inside in a way he’d
never known before. He knew women often liked to tell their stories,
their True Stories, and he’d have liked to hear her story, why she was
here in this place, what had become of her in the time since they’d sat
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 191
together on the floor of his room. But no. When he asked about her life
her wary gaze began to move away, as though bad things drew close
around her at the question, and might come closer if she answered.
What’s it matter, she’d say. What’s it to you. The worst was how it
made him work all the harder to ease that dissatisfaction, to draw
down her questioning black brows, to still the turmoil that he sensed in
her being—that he even touched, he thought, when he was within her:
when she lay without moving, always, never letting him move either,
clutching at his arms to keep him still. Until her brief spasm came or
didn’t. Then she was done. Nor would she permit anything French, not
lessons or anything else. Don’t, she’d say, we shouldn’t, that’s only for
married people. Sometimes afterward she was calm for a time and
they’d lie beneath the blankets and swap silly jokes, or she’d rise and in
her ratty plaid robe she’d cook them an egg or boil coffee and they’d sit
at the table together in companionable silence.
He could only visit her after night had fallen (he never saw the
people in the house to which her rooms were attached, almost didn’t
believe there were any there, never more than one window dimly alight
when he came up the street). He’d awaken before dawn—for some
reason The Light in the Woods started work at an early hour, maybe
only to make their difference from a real business obvious—and put
his braces on and dress, wanting to creep back into the bed beside the
unmoving dark lump of her; drink a cup of cold coffee from the night
before, take the lunch he’d made, and go out into the winter darkness
and to the corner to await the bus. Then stand for a few hours at the
clothes tables in the eternal odor of mothballs and moldered wool and
sort the useless from the reclaimable, noting the missing buttons, the
stain (blood?), the decayed lining or detached sleeve, thinking of the
lives of these men and women and children, Fauntleroy suits of possi-
bly dead boys, wedding dresses of disappointed brides, chalk-striped
suits of bank tellers now in prison. The More You Sort the More You
Earn.
Salvageable things went on the cart to Repairs. Silks were reserved
for government reclaiming, whether women’s negligees or men’s fine
monogrammed shirts. Foundation garments contained rubber, wave
them aloft for laughs. Furs, no matter how moth-eaten, were set aside,
for they would be cut up to line the vests of merchant marine sailors;
192 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Prosper caught in them the faint remains of perfume from their long-
ago wearers, strangely persistent, and thought of men standing watch
on night ships smelling it too, shamingly intimate and evocative.
In addition to all the stuff coming in on the trucks to be sorted and
fixed, The Light in the Woods had contracted with local war industries
to do jobs that could be done off-site. The airplane factory sent them
barrels of floor sweepings, from which dropped bolts and rivets could be
extracted and returned to the works; a number of blind people sat along
one table onto which the contents of these barrels were emptied, feeling
through the sweepings and finding the rivets; after a short time they
were able to distinguish each of the several sizes of rivets in the mix and
distribute them to separate containers. One was a young woman whose
blind eyes were pale and a little crossed, who smiled slightly and con-
tinuously at nothing, her head lifted—why should she look down? But it
made her appear strangely joyful or alight, and Prosper watched her
when he could, guiltily enjoying the fact that she couldn’t tell he looked.
In the late winter afternoon the bus went back, circling the poorer
parts of town, stopping to let off one after another, the driver getting
out to set a wooden step before the door when needed, careful now,
take your time. The Sad Sacks, Prosper called them to Elaine, not to
seem one of them himself. She made him confess what The Light in the
Woods was paying him, though he tried to put her off. She made no
reply when he told her.
Neither Bea nor May would ask him where he spent his nights
now—at least no more than to ascertain he was all right and needed
nothing they had between them to give; he was a grown man now, and
doing the things they imagined grown men did, though when either of
them began a sentence of speculation about just what that might be,
the other cut her off, not wanting to think about it. He seemed not to
be at Mert’s beck and call anyway, and that was a good sign. Bea had
volunteered to be a local War Council block leader, wearing a cute cap
with a Civilian Defense badge on it and going around her block, hand-
ing out pamphlets about reclaiming tin and rubber or growing a Vic-
tory Garden and preserving more food. Bea could talk to anybody.
May missed Prosper’s company more. To her great sadness Fenix
Vigaron had gone away. She’d informed May that the sudden vast
increase in souls coming across to her side was upsetting the economy of
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 193
heaven as nothing had before or since. So many people all over the world
dying such terrible deaths all at once, arriving so sore and shaken and
unprepared, strained the resources of solace and succor that even infinite
Love could provide. Fenix’s work was with them now: she blessed May
and wished her well (the child had become, even as many living persons
seemed to become, strangely nicer and warmer in the emergency) and
promised that someday when the docks weren’t so crowded with the lost
and vastated she’d return to May’s board and her glass and candle; she
expected, though, that it would get worse before it got better.
So it was change in all they saw and did, for them as for everyone:
but still the two women were shocked when Prosper told them he was
leaving town to find a job that paid something and, also, to do his part:
he thought there was a part he could do, and he was going to do it. Out
west anybody sitting on a park bench would be approached within an
hour by three people with offers of work. Bea and May could hardly
answer: couldn’t say no, of course, but like any parents who’ve raised a
crippled child, it was going to be hard for them, war or no war, to see
their boy go off: as hard and fearsome (though they’d never say it) as
for any mother seeing off her soldier boy.
He’d quit at The Light in the Woods a week before. Ever since he
began working there he’d been growing angrier, not a feeling he’d felt
very often, somehow new to him, as new as what Elaine made him feel,