chin. She wore a pair of slacks (the working women in the newsreels all
wore them, Connie didn’t have to explain) and those same saddle
shoes, their white parts scuffed and dingy.
“There’s a can of tomato soup,” she said to her mother. For a
moment she couldn’t find the card given to her the day before, no here
it was in the coat’s inside pocket. “And some Velveeta cheese you can
put in it.” Her mother said nothing, and would do as she saw fit, but
Connie needed to show her that she’d thought about this and was pre-
pared. She hugged Adolph with a strange sudden passion, as though it
might be a long time till she returned, and went out and down the
steep steps into the unwelcoming day. She turned left not right at the
sidewalk. In this direction there had never been anything of much use
to her. The sidewalk tilted downward, its squares cracked and buckled,
and in a few blocks Connie passed under the black railroad viaduct
that crossed all that industrial bottom. A train was chugging toward
the crossing over her head—she’d heard its approaching wail as she left
her house—and just as Connie walked under, it did cross, thudding
and still screaming. The damp sky turned away the ashy yellow smoke,
the hollow of earth drew it down and it covered Connie like a dropped
curtain, bitter and stinging; for a moment she couldn’t see anything at
all, but then she parted the curtain and came out on the other side; the
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 221
train had passed. Farther on was the green wooden shelter where the
bus stopped.
Why should she feel ashamed, when no one knew or could guess
she was here not because she wanted to help and be a good person but
because she was afraid—more afraid of not having enough than she
was afraid to go farther on, on this side where she had not before
belonged? The shelter, and the bus when it came, was full of women
and men talking and complaining and kidding one another, and some
others like her seemingly here for the first time and looking around
themselves boldly or uncertainly, peach-faced teenagers too skinny to
be soldiers, women her mother’s age, one in a fox fur piece. Together.
Connie clung to the enameled pole, rocked with all of them.
At a farther stop a problem of some kind arose—Connie in the
dense middle of the bus couldn’t see it directly, only hear the exchange
between the driver and someone having trouble getting on. Listen
mister I am under no obligation. Reserve the right I mean. Other voices
entered in, either taking the driver’s side that whoever it was couldn’t
be accommodated, or arguing with the driver and the others to let the
guy on, give him a hand for Chrissake, what’s it to ya, let’s get this
wagon rolling. One of the voices must have been the fellow trying to
get on, but Connie couldn’t tell which. Then she could see a couple of
people had joined in to help him despite the driver and the others, and
a long crutch was handed up and then another, and after them a lanky
body, a man in a fedora and a houndstooth jacket. He was lifted up
into the bus like someone pulled from a well, looking startled and wary
and maybe grateful, while the complainers still went on about moving
along, voices from Connie’s back of the bus calling out impatiently
now also. The gears of the bus ground horribly. Everybody seemed to
have an opinion about the matter, but nobody spoke to the young man
himself as far as she could tell; she could see his hat bobbing a little
between some of their heads.
At the various plant and shop gates the workers got off—Connie
could see, out the rear window, another bus just behind hers, carrying
more—until the Bull plant was reached. Once, Connie had brought
Bunce his lunch pail here when he’d forgot it, and he’d told her never to
come again. There was an aluminum model of the Bull fighter plane in
front, looking unlikely or imaginary, but the buildings of the plant
222 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
behind were just factory buildings, three big brick buildings that had
once made something else and were now combined. 1. 2. 3. Connie got
out the rear door with some others; she glanced back once at the crip-
pled man now seated and holding his crutches by the middle hand-bar,
like a man holding a trombone. She could see his back was severely
swayed.
“If that was me I’d kill myself,” a man walking beside her said. He
was hatless and wore a badge like Bunce’s pinned to his jacket. Connie
said nothing; she shrank from people who offered opinions like that
out loud in public to no one. The man had a black dead look, as though
he might just kill himself anyway. They all walked toward the gates of
Number 3, just then sliding open on their tracks.
She did no work that day, but still she was there the whole of the shift.
With the other new employees she was set on a broad yellow stripe
painted on the concrete floor and already flaking away, and told to
follow it to the different places she needed to go. Far off the huge
nameless noises of the plant could be heard. She hadn’t thought she’d
just arrive and take her place in line and begin doing one of the things
shown in the magazines, but she hadn’t had a different picture of what
would happen either. The first place the yellow stripe led to was a long
room with a paper sign on the door that said Induction. Inside were a
number of booths and stations labeled with arrows to show you how
to proceed. At Requisition she handed in her card from the govern-
ment employment agency but had to go through the same information
again, with variations, as the clerk filled in things without lifting his
eyes; he handed her forms and asked, still not looking up, if she had
any questions, and after a moment of being unable to produce a
thought of any kind she said no. Then at the next station she had to
show her birth certificate, and here it is, with two infant footprints,
but it’s the wrong thing—this is a hospital notice of live birth and not
a legal birth certificate like the others have, an engrossed document
with seals. The clerk shrugged wearily. Connie thought of offering her
grown-up feet for comparison, but the clerk just handed it back to her
without looking up and pointed the way to the next booth. She folded
up the little feet. The Clock Clerk (that’s who the sign said the next
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 223
person was) gave her an employee number and a time card and told
her how to use it. Her starting rate of pay was fifty cents an hour for
base-rate production and a bonus prorated on work done above the
base. Any questions? Connie said no. Probably it would all be obvious
what to do and how to do it if she actually started. Behind her the line
of new employees shuffled forward. She had her fingerprints taken, by
a man who grasped her fingers and thumbs like tools, pressed them
firmly on the somehow loathsome leaking purple pad and rolled them
expertly onto the spaces on a paper form. Her employee number was
written on the top. Herself and none other. She was photographed,
asked curtly to take off her hat, no time to check her hair or choose an
expression. Bunce had looked in his photograph like John Garfield in
a picture they’d post outside a theater, he always looked splendid in
pictures. Next she and a group of others were read the Espionage Act
at a mile a minute. By Order of the President of the United States.
Connie had already decided that she would figure out some way to tell