them was called out by a nun for some special purpose: was it good or
bad? Good for them, bad for her? Or the opposite? “All done,” Connie
said. The man motioned to her place at the table, and Connie first
thought he meant she ought to pick up her leavings, then saw he wanted
her to take her coat and follow him, and she did.
Her revised pay rate would be sixty cents an hour, a sum she kept mul-
tiplying all the way home in various combinations, by the day, the
minute, the week, the month. Above that base rate she would get a half
a cent more for every ten pieces completed, and the man who put her
through her tests (which included loading tiny ball bearings into a
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 227
wheel, moving through a series of meaningless tasks in the most effi-
cient way, reading eye charts through elaborate goggles) said she was
sure to do well with that, and in not too long a time she would be
moving up into Quality Control and make just a little more, if she
chose to stay, which he hoped she would—nodding at her in an affir-
mative way that made it hard for her to resist nodding back. She was
amazed to find she was good at something she’d never known about
before, not good at a task or good at sticking to it or any of those
qualities, but good at it in herself, in her being, her body: eyes and fin-
gers and senses. She tried to remember instances where she had used
those abilities without noticing them, in homemaking class, in making
birthday cards or Spiritual Bouquets, finding lost things, picking up
pins, but nothing struck her. Hand-Eye Coordination. That was the
talent really, plus the Visual Acuity. She had excellent visual acuity. She
said it out loud as she went up the hill under the viaduct toward her
street: excellent visual acuity. She looked steadily and intently to where
her own house was just then coming into view, and by somehow not
straining but relaxing—not pointing her vision toward the place but
opening her eyes to receive the incoming pictures—she could clearly
see someone standing on the porch. It was the woman in the top apart-
ment of the right-hand house, a long-armed bony square-jawed woman
named Mrs. Freundlich. She had lived there with her grown son, who
for some reason had not been drafted for a long time; maybe he was
too fat, though that didn’t seem to keep others out. When he finally did
get his notice and went away the mother was left; she seemed never to
come out of her apartment, and Connie would have felt sorry for her,
except that she seemed to forbid sympathy. She was standing on the
steps of the building, hands under her apron, a coat over it, seeming
lost in thought, maybe waiting for someone (the mailman?). Connie,
exalted somehow by her day at the Bull plant, waved and smiled at the
woman as she came closer, and got an idea at the same moment. It was
only a matter of thinking how to put it.
“How is your son, Mrs. Freundlich? How is he doing?”
“Got a postal card t’other day,” the woman said, leaving it at that.
“Does that leave you a lot of time?” Connie asked. “Him not being
here, I mean?” A look of incomprehension grew across the old lady’s
face, and Connie hurried on. She got through the basic proposal, and
228 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
said that she’d be making good money at the plant and could pay what-
ever Mrs. Freundlich thought was fair, to all of which Mrs. Freundlich
listened without response, when she suddenly said, “Does he mind?”
Connie tried out a couple of possible meanings for this and then
said “Oh sure. Yes. He’s a good boy.”
“I won’t have him if he won’t mind.”
Connie almost told her to go talk to Adolph’s grandmother, who
was upstairs with him right now, but instead she just let the idea sink
in a little; and after a strange silent moment Mrs. Freundlich seemed to
collect herself and began to ask sensible questions and offer arrange-
ments and even praised Connie brusquely for doing war work.
So that was done. What a piece of luck. Adolph would be right in
the building, and her mother could go home. And Connie Wrobleski,
without husband or child, would spend all day doing what? Something
she had never done before. The world was no longer the same as it was:
everyone said so.
2
For all the talk about her visual acuity and all that, the job Connie
was given without explanation or apology was running a huge
electric welder that formed U-shaped pieces of steel into frame
parts, and mostly involved turning it on and off at the right times.
She fed in the half-circle of steel, along with a steel cylinder, which was
the sleeve for a driving pinion (that’s what she was told it was), shut the
machine door, and threw a switch to turn on the juice. At intervals she
had to press big buttons to govern the process, but the machine had a
revolving guard that prevented her pressing any but the right one at the
right instant; as long as she could move her arm she couldn’t go wrong.
It seemed amazing, fearsome, to her, but the engineer who taught her
about it treated it like it was an antique, a buggy, a cider press, smack-
ing it with his hand now and then and talking to it or about it, Come
on old horse, aw now don’t go doing that, y’old rattletrap. When it
seized up for one reason or another he had to come back, de couple the
power cords, open the side panels, and do things she couldn’t under-
stand while she stood arms crossed nearby trying to look ready to help.
Why was he so angry? She felt she had descended into another kind of
world, where everything had grown huge, or she had grown small.
Noises here were vast: there was a continuous ringing of metal, a sledge
dropped onto steel flooring plates made a noise huger than she had
230 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
known was possible just from somebody dropping something. The
power cords that the annoyed engineer coupled and decoupled from
the rank of outlets on the wall were thicker than her arm, the couplings
like buckets, things unrelated to lamp cords or plugs or the twisted
wires of electric fans—when he signaled her to pull the start-up switch
again, the power seemed to hit the machine with a ringing blow,
making it shudder.
The whole place was also dirty and messy, which surprised her.
Piles of stuff in process covered with dust and overlaid with other stuff,
as though somebody had bought the wrong things and just left them
sitting. There was something wrong here: some people, like her super-
visor, worked constantly, and others seemed not to work at all, they
jawed and laughed, sorted through machine parts idly and knocked off
for lunch before the horn sounded; far off amid the noise of machinery
she could hear human rows too. Maybe it was always like this, factory
work, as full of loose ends and cross-purposes as home, though she
was surprised to think it was so; in the movies work always proceeded
through the stages of production purposefully, white molten metal
poured into rods, rods shaped into this or that, a product taking shape
as farsighted men gave directions to great machines and the assembly
line crawled forward. Had she learned better? Or was it just this place?
Bunce always griped about it, said it was a shambles. She was sorry
that in her part of the plant she didn’t even see the airplanes taking
shape; that was in another of the three buildings that were combined