train station, Connie, and her boy, walking slowly and both
looking upward, as once he had done on first entering here. The
boy was pointing up into the fantastic tangle of beams and struts fill-
ing the spaces overhead.
He reached where they stood and looked up with them. A crane car
was now drifting with great slowness toward them, carrying an entire
assembled wing section slung below and hanging in midair.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “They’ve got it backward.”
“Oh. Oh hi.”
Connie looked where he looked: it made her heart sink toward her
stomach to watch the wings proceed down the line. They weren’t fin-
ished, they needed their final pieces on each end, she could see that, but
they had their huge engines all installed, three on each side, and yes,
she saw that they were on the wrong edge, they were on the behind
edge not the leading edge where all airplanes have their engines.
“Oh gee,” Prosper said. “This one’ll never fly.”
Was he joking? He had to be. Above the moving wing assembly she
could see the crane operator, a woman. Maybe she’d made some dread-
ful . . . But no, of course not, all the dozens of men on the floor were look-
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 255
ing up too, whole teams ready to mount the rolling staircases and assist
the mating, which wasn’t different in a way from affixing the wings cross-
wise on a little balsa-wood model, the notches precut to receive the tabs.
They’d surely see if anything wasn’t right. She felt Prosper’s hand on her
elbow—looking upward she hadn’t seen him come so close as to touch
her—and he was smiling. “Nah. They told me the same thing when I
started,” he said. “They’re called pusher engines. They work fine. They
push instead of pulling. They told us how, but I couldn’t repeat it.”
Now the two parts were coming together, so slowly as to seem
unmoving. A team of men (and one tall woman) guided it down—they
seemed able to move it with a touch, vast as it was. The little people—
they seemed little now compared to it, its huge tires and struts and
expanses of silvery metal—swarmed up the ladders and made ready to
do whatever they had to do to link them.
Connie walked on. She’d begun to see, in that moment, as though
through the confusing reflection of thousands of overhead bars of light
on shiny identical parts, how it was meant to work, how it did work.
Behind the plane another middle part stood, and another crane now
turned the corner bringing in another pair of wings to be rested on it.
Who thought of this? she wondered. How long did it take to think
of? Did people just know that’s the way big airplanes had to be built, or
was it a new plan just for these? Did they argue about it, work it all out,
come to an agreement? If it didn’t work, and it was you who’d thought
of it and convinced the others, what happened to you? Did you lose
your job and have to go away in shame? Or did they spread the blame
around, and just set to work to do better? Nobody’d ever explained any
of this to her. Maybe everybody knew about it, maybe it was so univer-
sally known that nobody thought they needed to explain it to her. She
bet not, though. She bet almost nobody knew it, not all these women
and men working away, the shop stewards and the engineers unrolling
their blueprints, toolshops dispensing tools, she bet none of them knew
any more than she did. She wondered if they’d even wondered. If she
had, they must have, mustn’t they? Some of them at least. A few.
She became aware of Adolph tugging at her slacks. Somehow the
place didn’t alarm or terrify him, maybe it was just too huge to be per-
ceived, out of his ken.
“Yes, hon.”
256 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
He tugged again, she was to get it. “Tired and hungry,” she said to
Prosper. “We came to see where his daddy works.” She showed him the
visitor pass she’d been given.
“Well say,” he said. “Maybe he’d like an ice cream. There’s a milk
bar just down in the far corner there, off the floor.”
“Really. Well, that’s nice. We’ll do that.”
“I’m just off,” Prosper said. “I could use a soda too. Mind if I . . .”
“No no,” Connie said. She looked down at Adolph. “Okeydokey?”
she said.
The milk bar was a long space with the wide plate-glass windows that
were everywhere here, as though no one should be hidden from anyone
else, the common job proceeding in your sight even if you weren’t doing
it, and if you were, showing you what you could do next, relax and enjoy.
It was sort of self-service, you stood in line and ordered from a long
menu, then moved away to be given what you’d ordered. The whole place
was painted in pink, pale brown, and yellow, like Neapolitan ice cream.
“Oh gee I forgot, I didn’t bring any money,” Connie said. “Oh I’m
so sorry.” They were already far up the line, and Adolph, who knew
where he was now, was reaching symbolically toward the treats being
handed out. What had she thought, that this was a date?
“I think I’ve got some,” Prosper said. “A little.”
“Oh no,” she said. “No no.”
“Sure.” Balancing on each crutch in turn, he rooted in his right then
his left pocket. He held out the coins he’d found to her in his palm, and
she counted them with a forefinger. Not much.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I mean I don’t really need.”
“No come on,” he said. “An ice cream for, for Adolph, and why
don’t we split an ice-cream soda? Would that be all right?”
“Well.” He was so, what, so willing, no standing on pride, it made
her smile. “All right.”
“Double chocolate?”
“All right.”
She got Adolph’s ice cream; she was making for a booth when she
looked back—Prosper still stood at the counter and the soda was before
him and Connie realized he’d have a hard time carrying it away, maybe
couldn’t at all, had he always had someone to help? He must need it.
Like Adolph. But never really growing all the way up.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 257
She got the soda and they sat; Adolph dug into the ice cream and
Connie and Prosper de-papered their straws and plunged them into the
dark foaming soda together; took a suck; raised their eyes to meet.
Like a kid’s first date, she thought, like one in the movies anyway.
It was that scene, displayed by the picture windows, that Vi Harbi-
son saw, just knocking off then too. Stopped even to observe for a bit,
occluded by the crowd passing outward around her: how absorbed
they were, spooning, sucking, speaking, smiling. Ain’t that grand, she
thought, and she really thought it was; almost laughed a hot dangerous
laugh at the pleasure it gave her, well well well.
They weren’t quite done, still sucking noisily at the bottom of the
glass in its silvery holder, when Bunce came by. In the great seamless
transition from shift to shift nearly everyone going out passed these
windows, this place, which is why it was where it was.
He banged in through the glass doors and was beside Connie’s
booth before she knew he’d come in.
“What are you doing, Connie?”
He shot one look at Prosper and no more, inviting no remark.
“Bunce.”
“Are you trying to make a monkey out of me?” He lifted Adolph
from his seat, who began to complain, not done yet. “Come on.”
Connie glanced once at Prosper, who’d neither moved nor spoken,