tailed men with oxcarts, larky boatmen on canal boats, a stagecoach
and an old puffer-belly locomotive, all of it pressed up together in the
picture as though it had happened all at once, as crowded with con-
trary people pushing and tugging as the station below it. Around her as
she moved slowly forward men were working the line, offering Pull-
man tickets to the South, where Connie was headed; they were asking
ten or twenty dollars above the standard price for these tickets, which
were (they said) all sold out at the window. Everybody wanted to go
south now, old people to Florida, women to the training camps where
their men were stationed. Right by the ticket window as Connie reached
it was a sign that said is this trip necessary? in stark black letters.
Like an old aunt or nun, the government making sure you weren’t
doing anything just for fun, and she wasn’t, if the government were to
ask her she could say Yes this trip is necessary.
“Ponca City, Oklahoma,” she said, or cried aloud in the din. “Coach
class. Myself and a baby, is all. One way.”
PART THREE
1
The week after Christmas Bunce Wrobleski came home from the
Bull aircraft plant with newspapers that were full of ads for
workers with skills like his—ads for workers of any kind, actu-
ally, columns and columns of them after the deserts of last
decade’s employment pages, jobs in this city and jobs far away. Situa-
tions Available. Bunce wanted a new situation. Well, that was pretty
obvious. He stood in the lamplight at midnight (couldn’t even get off
Swing Shift at this damn plant, he’d said), a Lucky dangling from his
plump sweet lower lip, his collar turned up and his cap still on at a
rakish angle with its bill sharply curled, its buttons on it—his union
button, Blue Team button, plant admission button with his picture on
it wearing the same cap the button was pinned to; and Connie’d
thought, What a beautiful man, as she never could help thinking,
despite that foxy or wolfish cunning that was sometimes in his lashy
eyes, as it was then. He pulled off the cap and tossed it and tousled his
thick hair. The job listing he had shown her was in an aircraft plant
miles away.
The rule now was that if a man quit his war-work job to go look for
something better, or if he took some job that wasn’t war work, then his
deferment could end, even fathers wouldn’t be exempt for long. Basi-
cally he was tied to his job. That was the rule. He was the same as a
212 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
soldier, in a way; no different. At the kitchen table he had laid it out for
Connie, moving the salt and pepper shakers and the ashtray gently
around the oilcloth in relation to one another, as though they were the
elements of the contract he had accepted. Constance watched his
broken-nailed hands as he explained. His eyes weren’t meeting hers.
The salt and pepper shakers were little bisque figures of a hen and a
rooster; the rooster was the pepper.
But—Bunce explained, moving away the ashtray, opening a path
for the rooster across the flowery field of the oilcloth—but if you could
locate a different job in some other war industry plant, a job that was
rated higher than the one you had, and you had the qualifications for
it, then you could quit the one and be in no danger from the draft if
you went and took the other. The job he had here was no good. He
could do better.
“You know why I got stuck here,” he said, and only now did he
raise his eyes to Connie—she being the other piece of the rebus, she
and Adolph asleep in the next room. Sure she knew, and she wasn’t
going to look down or away from him. He could have used a safe that
night in the back of the Plymouth and they wouldn’t be stuck, but then
there’d be no Adolph either, and she wasn’t going to think that would
be a good thing.
For a time after Bunce went across the country to the new job, a
kind of stasis settled over her; it was like waiting for him to get home
from the shift but it went on all day long, and was there at night when
Adolph woke her, the sensation of Bunce not there and nothing to do
or to be until he came in, which he wasn’t going to do. She was careful
to keep herself up, for no one. She put on her makeup and a pair of the
nylons that Bunce had bought from a guy who suddenly had a lot of
pairs. She went to the hairdresser and with a ration stamp got her
bangs curled high on her head and the length in back curled too like
the bottom of a waterfall striking its pool. She did all that and at the
same time felt a strange temptation, a yen or tug, not to do it, to stop
altogether and live in the house and the bed the way Adolph did, with-
out caring or thinking.
For a few weeks the postal orders came regularly from Bunce, for
different amounts, sometimes more, sometimes less. Then a week went
by without one: it was like the sudden stopping of her heart, when it
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 213
takes that gulp of nothing, then rolls over somehow and starts again,
thumping hard and fast for a moment as though to catch up. Just that
same way a postal order came the next week, bigger than ever. But
then weeks started to pass without them.
She wrote a postcard to Bunce at the last address she had for him
and heard nothing for a while; then a letter came, with some bills
folded small and tucked into the small sheets, a five, two tens, some
ones.
Honey I’m sorry I didn’t send more lately but you can’t believe
how expensive it is out here Food costs more and every cheap
diner charges fifty cents for a plate of stew The rents are worse
when you can even get a place I was rooming with some fellows
and we got into a wrangle I’m sorry to say and I had to leave I
am doing all right now but they aren’t going to forward mail if
you wrote any, they never do from rooming houses. I hope to
come home for a while soon with any luck but you know how
the trains are. Kiss my boy for me.
So that was the rent for the month plus the five she was shy for last
month, and some food money, which wasn’t so cheap here either in
spite of all the controls they talked about. The next three weeks went
by with nothing from Bunce.
Connie Wrobleski was twenty years old and hadn’t ever faced the
prospect of nothing, no support, no surrounding provider. Kids she
knew at school had to drop out because their fathers lost their jobs, but
she hadn’t worried because her father was a bus driver for the city and
the union was good. Not even finding out she was pregnant had felt
like facing nothing, because Bunce (after he had banged on the steering
wheel of the Plymouth so long and hard she thought it would break,
making a noise behind his clenched teeth like a bad dog) promised her
it was okay and he’d never leave her, he wasn’t that kind of guy. And
anyway so many of the girls in her class at Holy Name were in the
same condition by the night of the Senior Ball, some of them showing
already and proudly wearing their rings even though the Father Super-
intendent said they were forbidden to—well if all of them were in the
same boat, and if Bunce was going to be good and already had a good