214 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
job, then it felt more like the good scary beginning of something larger
than she had ever known, something that would just go on and on and
show her what it was as it happened, like that scene in movies where
at the start you fly over hills and down roads and up to a house in a
town and through a door that opens as you come to it and into the
kitchen where a family is in the middle of their lives. This, though—
the drying up of those letters, the little flight of them failing—this felt
like having and knowing nothing at all. Adolph looked up at her and
she down into the huge pools of his eyes, and he was sure of more than
she was.
Late on the last Saturday of the month—suddenly remembering
the task with a grip to her heart—Connie got Adolph wrapped in the
red-and-white woolens and cap her mother had knitted for him, and
lifted him into the huge blue-black baby carriage for which he was
already too big, and from which he seemed likely to fling himself out
like a movie gangster from a speeding sedan. She walked the carriage
backward down the steep steps before her house (Adolph laughing at
every bump). The house was a double one, each half the mirror image
of the other, to which it was joined like a Siamese twin, two apart-
ments per house. She turned rightward up the street. Leftward went
down under the viaduct and past the millworkers’ houses and the coal
and ice dealer’s to where you caught a bus that went along the train
yards out to where the Bull plant was, the great brick buildings marked
with big numbers, Number 3 where Bunce had worked. Rightward
the street went up for a while, the heavy carriage bouncing sedately
over the seams in the sidewalk, past the blackened and forbidding
Methodist church and then down, past the IGA and into a neighbor-
hood of single houses, to cross the avenue where the brown-brick
grammar school stood on its pillow of earth. On this day the ration
books for the month were given out there. You went around back,
where in the playground kids were dangling from the jungle gym wait-
ing for their mothers; Connie could feel their cold skinned knees and
barked knuckles—Bunce always said that imagining pain and discom-
fort was worse for her than the real thing when it came, which it
almost never did.
She went in the back door to the strangeness of an empty echoey
school smelling of kids and old lunches, to the cafeteria where the volun-
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 215
teers were handing out booklets and checking names. Most of the volun-
teers were teachers at the school, and since Connie didn’t have a child at
the school they didn’t know her. She carried Adolph in her arms, he was
scared to get down and walk, and of course all the women wanted a
look at him and smiled and asked Connie what his name was.
“Adolph?” said a man behind her in line. “There’s a heck of a name
to lay on a kid.”
“It’s his grandfather’s name,” Connie said, looking straight ahead,
thinking maybe that made it worse.
“Is he a German?”
“It’s a fine name,” said the woman behind the scarred table. A
wooden box filled with stamp books was beside her.
“It was a fine name a couple of years ago,” Connie said. “When he
got it.”
“Well sure. Like Adolphe Menjou.” Connie handed her the ragged
and empty remains of the old book—you couldn’t get a new one with-
out handing in the old—and was given her book of rough gray paper
and a sheet of printed reminders and notices for the month, which she
would sit down later and try to master.
At the door where the people who had been given their books went
out, a man in a sleeveless sweater and a bedraggled bow tie stood by a
folding table. A sandwich board was open beside it. It showed four
women’s faces in profile, almost identical but receding into the dis-
tance; their eyes were lifted toward the horizon or the sky, and their
hair was rolled in fat curls like Connie’s. A wide red band ran across
the middle of the picture as though someone had rushed up and slapped
it on. It said american women—they can do it!
Connie had seen this poster and other posters like it before, in the
movies and in the papers, the newsreel stories about women trooping
off to work in their overalls and bandannas, moving huge machines
and handling tools with big smiles on their faces and then touching up
their makeup after work with a different kind of smile. But just then on
that Saturday the picture struck her as somehow about her in a way
the others before had not. The man in the bow tie looked at her, smil-
ing in an appraising sort of way, but she felt no constraint at his look,
his hands were clasped harmlessly behind him like a minister or a
floorwalker, someone ready to do you good.
216 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Hello,” she said. She let Adolph slip from her and settle to the
ground, where with great care he crept under the tentlike sandwich
board and sat, hands on his knees.
“Cute little fella,” the man said. “His dad in the service?”
Connie raised her eyes to him but said nothing, not evasive though,
feeling her face to be like the faces of the women in the poster, frank
and farsighted and at the same time containing a secret about them-
selves.
“Best thing you could do for him is go down to city hall and fill out
an application for work,” he said then, raising a definite forefinger.
“Everybody can help.”
“I couldn’t, because of,” Connie said, and reached a hand toward
Adolph.
“Lot of girls think that,” the man said. “They find a way.” He
picked up one each of the papers in piles on the table and gave them to
her. “You go on down. You’ll see. Everybody can do something. City
hall. There’s a poster just outside, tells you what to do next. You just
go on from there.”
In the apartment again Connie turned on all the lights to banish the
growing dark. They seemed pale and ineffectual for a long time until
the dark came fully down and they grew strong and yellow and warm.
Bunce hated to have more than just the one bulb burning you needed to
see what you were doing at the moment; when he was with her she
hadn’t minded the little pools of light and the dark rooms around, but
now she did.
“Okay, honey?” she said to Adolph, who sat on the little painted
potty chair in the bathroom, pants down and waiting, hands clasped
together before him like a little old man or a schoolmarm. “Can you
push?” She grunted for him, give him the idea, and he watched her with
interest but wouldn’t imitate. Sometimes she wondered if he was all
there, Adolph. So mild and good and quiet. His eyes now searching her
face, untroubled and interested. “Okay, you sit a while and see. Okay?”
She went out into the kitchen, stepping backward so that he could see
she was still there, still smiling. Then she sat at the table with her book
of stamps and the announcements that had been given out with it.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 217
G, H and J blue stamps, worth a total of forty-eight points a
person, become valid tomorrow, January 24, and are good
throughout the month of February. D, E and F blue stamps, in
use since December 25, expire January 31. Thus there will be an
overlap period of one week in which all six stamps will be valid.
These stamps cover canned, bottled and frozen fruits and vege-
tables and their juices, dry beans, peas, lentils, etc., and processed