foods such as soups, baby foods, baked beans, catsup and chili
sauce.
A bottle of ketchup cost a whopping fifteen points and Bunce
couldn’t live without it. Connie got more points than she could use,
now that it was just her and Adolph. Dolph. Adi. Addo. There just
wasn’t a nickname. Her father-in-law was called Buster by everyone
and always had been.
She had plenty of stamps but not a lot of money. Her purse, soft and
with a crossbones catch like a miniature carpetbag, hung inside her
handbag, attached by a ribbon—meant to keep it from getting lost, she
guessed, unless the whole bag was. She emptied it on the table, the
coins clinking and rolling away merrily on the oilcloth till she caught
them. There weren’t many bills, and only a couple of tens in the tin
candy box on the top shelf.
When Bunce got into the union her father had solemnly taken his
shoulder and Connie’s and said that he was glad, glad to know now
they would never be in want. Want: never to want for anything. Free-
dom from Want was one of the Four Freedoms the President had said
everyone should have, the whole world. The pale ghost children in
newsreels, refugees, eating their bowls of soup but still alert and afraid.
She turned back to the bathroom. If Adolph inclined his head he could
see her in the kitchen, and she could see his little blond head around
the door’s corner.
“Okay? Anything coming?”
He smiled as though at a joke.
There just wasn’t a way to be sure enough money would be coming
in, no way to guarantee it. Every week there might be or there might
not. And every week that there wasn’t would press you further down
till you had gone too far to come back. Of course they weren’t going to
218 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
starve, her parents and Bunce’s wouldn’t let that happen, but that
didn’t make her feel safe. She thought that now maybe she wouldn’t
ever feel safe again in the way that she once had, and that this moment
of understanding had lain deep within the whole life she had led, at
home and in school and in church, in the movie theater, with the Sodal-
ity girls, in the Plymouth and the big lumpy bed with Bunce. She had
never been safe at all, and she hadn’t known it, and now she did.
“Ine done, Mommy.”
“Okay, sweet. That was a good try.” He pulled up his pants as he
walked, a cute trick he wouldn’t be able to do so well forever, like a
guy hurrying out of a girl’s room before he was caught with her.
City hall, that’s where the man had said to go. Where she’d got her
marriage license, never having been in it before, the tall corridors lined
with gold-numbered wooden doors. A poster outside, to tell you what
to do.
Freedom from Fear. That was another of the four.
On Tuesday (it took a couple of days to make a decision, and she made
it only on the grounds that going downtown and inquiring committed
her to nothing) Connie lined up in the corridor outside the doors of the
United States Employment Agency with a crowd mostly female and of
all ages, far too many to fit into the little waiting room (Connie could
glimpse into it, crowded with people, when the secretary opened the
door to let someone out or call someone in). She’d taken a long time to
dress, not knowing what would look right for someone applying to
work in a factory, where she imagined the jobs would mostly be, and
then—annoyed at herself for trying to make people think she was who
they wanted, when she didn’t know if she even wanted them to think
so—she put on a tartan skirt, a sweater, flats but with a pair of Bunce’s
stockings, her old cloth coat, and a beret. She thought she looked like
anybody.
“Just don’t tell them you can type,” said an older woman behind
her to a friend, a pale and ill-looking blonde. “If they know you can
type you’ll be typing till Tojo’s dead.”
The blonde said nothing. Connie thought the girl was planning to
say that she typed, and Connie wished she could too. She’d taken
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 219
Modern Homemaking instead of typing. In a magazine story she’d
recently looked at, jobs in factories were compared to housework. Run-
ning a drill press, it said, was no different from operating a mangle.
Washing engine parts in chemicals was like washing dishes—gray-
haired women were shown doing it, rubber gloves on their hands, smil-
ing, unafraid.
A crowd of people, hands full of forms, were let out from the
employment office. Connie was in the next group called in. In the office
she got into one of the lines before the counter. All around in every seat
and leaning against the wall women and some men too filled out the
same forms. The room smelled of unemptied ashtrays and overheated
people. The woman at the counter, astonishingly placid amid all this,
with two pencils stuck in her bun, gave Connie a form, even while she
answered what even Connie could tell were stupid questions from
applicants and form fillers. It seemed to Connie that women like this,
with gray buns and patient smiles, were really conducting the life of
the nation while the generals and the statesmen busied themselves with
their important things.
The form was easy to fill out. All the answers were No. Typing?
Shorthand? Experience with Hollerith card sorter? PBX? Chauffeur’s
license? She assumed that if she didn’t understand a question she could
answer No or None. Physical handicap? Color-blind? Hard of hearing?
College degree? Own car? Married? She almost checked No for that
too, going rapidly down the row of boxes.
The lady with the gray bun seemed delighted with her application.
“Unskilled,” she said, as though it were to Connie’s credit. And then,
oblivious of the mob beating against her counter like waves on a rock
face, she engaged Connie in a conversation about where she could
work, what sort of work it would be (“dirty work, sometimes really
dirty,” and she brushed imaginary or symbolic dirt from her own
hands). They talked about Adolph, about what shift Connie might be
able to take, part-time, full-time. Connie could see, through the Vene-
tian blinds, the men on telephones in the back office, checking long
banners of paper; as soon as they hung up one phone they picked up
another. “There,” the woman said, writing words on a card. “Right
near by you. You g’down there tomorrow, eight a.m., and they’ll do the
intake.”
220 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Her kindly attention had already slipped away from Connie. Connie
took the card, thinking that she didn’t know exactly when she’d agreed
to do this, and was elbowed gently out of the way by the typist and her
friend. Not until she was back out in the day did she realize where
she’d been sent: to the same factory that was building Bull fighter
planes, where Bunce had worked before he left.
Wednesday was colder. Connie’s mother had come the day before, a
little doubtful, speaking in the small voice that Connie knew meant
she didn’t approve—or rather didn’t know whether to approve or not,
but thought not. Like the annuity her husband had invested his money
in, or Eleanor Roosevelt’s gadding, or Connie’s first pair of saddle
shoes. Anyway she was glad to see her grandson, and Adolph gave her
the wholehearted face of wondering joy—how could you resist it?
Connie already had her coat on and was tying her kerchief under her