She leaned over him, and Shirley politely stepped back. “We’ve got
to go,” she said. “I’ll write. We’ll meet again.” She leaned to kiss his
cheek, and at the same time her hand slipped under the sheet and into
the wide slit in his pajamas. She gave him a squeeze, gentle and firm.
“So long, big fella,” she said but looking at Prosper’s eyes. “Keep your-
self busy.”
She was gone, he could hear her laughter and Shirley’s as the door
closed behind them.
He’d never felt so sorry for himself in his life.
He ought to be able to get up and pursue her, not let her go, and
here he was stuck. He thought of scrambling into that damn chair and
racing out the door, but there were two steps there he’d never get over,
and if he did he’d never be able to get back in. Cry after her.
Sad Sack.
He still felt the squeeze she’d given him; and, as though it did too,
his organ swelled. What he and Vi had done, no more of that now, all
those things. He reached beneath the sheet as she had done, she for the
last time. His bandaged hand useless even for this, he had to swap it to
his left; tears now at last running one after the other toward his ears as
he lay, his soft sorry sobs and the other sound mixing.
There was a knock on the door, which Vi had left ajar. Startled, he
struggled to tuck himself away.
“Hi?” A woman’s voice. Not Vi.
“Yes!” he cried.
Connie Wrobleski in white shorts and tennis shoes opened the door.
She had a covered dish in her hands, her face was stricken with some
wild feeling that looked to him like grief or maybe guilt, and her little
boy peeped through her bare legs at him.
6
Vi Harbison thought it was odd how her heartbreak, like Prosper’s,
had started at the movies. Like the preachers used to say: Satan’s
machine for ruining young girls.
The theater in her town had closed in the bad years and only
opened again when times got a little better; Vi graduated from high
school that summer, aiming to go on to normal school—she’d got a
scholarship. The theater was called the Odeon, and Vi knew why; she
explained the name to the new manager, the day he came to take the
padlock and chain off the double doors, and Vi happened to be pass-
ing: she watched him insert the key into the lock and turn it, and the
fat gray thing fall in two in his hands. He was new in town.
“Odeon,” she’d said. “It’s Greek for ‘a place for performances.’ ”
“Well you’re pretty bright,” he said. She couldn’t judge his age—not
old, unburned and unlined, but maybe that came from making a living
in the dark: his eyes wide and soft, not like the men of this place,
around here even the boys’ eyes were always narrowed by the sun, cor-
ners puckered in crow’s-feet. What made her speak to him that way,
offer her bit of knowledge, she didn’t know. He reached into the pocket
of his pants and took out a handful of free passes.
“Bring all your friends,” he said, giving them to her.
“I don’t have this many,” she said.
270 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
He laughed and with a forefinger pushed back his white hat. “You
can use them all yourself,” he said. “A year’s worth of pictures.”
She was there with her father and brothers the night it opened, every-
one glad, they’d not known how much they’d missed it. A rootin’ tootin’
shoot-em-up, they delighted in it, laughing appreciatively at the unreal
lives of movie cowboys. He’d got the place swept of its wind-driven dust
and the broken chairs repaired and the chandelier rewired, but it was the
same place, nothing much, just a hick-town picture show. She wanted to
know why someone like him would want to come to this town that she
only wanted to leave, and she thought that finding the answer to that
was why she came in the middle of the day when almost nobody else did,
when he ran the picture for her alone—that’s what he said, selling her a
ticket, then immediately ripping it in half and giving her the stub, which
seemed unnecessary till he explained that those stubs he kept were how
the distributors of the picture calculated how much he’d make at every
showing. That two bits of yours has a nickel in it for me, he said.
Sometimes he’d come down from up where the picture was pro-
jected through a glass window, a cone of dusty shifting heaven-light,
and sit beside her, still wearing his hat; he’d feed her Milk Duds and
speak softly to her about the picture, tall pale women bantering with
clever men, their jokes meaning more than one thing, spoken in a way
that wasn’t like anyone spoke anywhere, speech as finely made as their
shimmering dresses.
“You could learn a lot from her,” he whispered. “She could teach
you a lot. Smart as you are.”
Teach her what? She tried to soften and silken her voice, speak in
those pear-shaped tones, say what shouldn’t be said in a way that could
be: and when she did it well—not blushing even—he’d smile at her in
the same way that the dark-eyed male actors smiled down at their
clever girls: as though he’d learned more than she’d said.
Because she was still a gangly half-made girl with bitten nails whose
father ran a failing farm supply store, whose best friends were her
brothers. He knew very well what she didn’t know.
He lived at the hotel, paying his rent every day, a dollar a day, as
though he’d not want to pay in advance for a room he might not have a
use for. He had a bed in his little office at the theater too, a daybed he
called it, a davenport she said, which made him laugh.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 271
Daybed. Bed for day. Her mother told her that men only want one
thing, that they are like beasts without thought or consideration; at the
same time she told Vi that someday one would come who was good
and kind and thoughtful and would love and care for her forever. The
two things canceled out and left her with no counsel. The high school
boys now headed out to farms and ranches or out of town hadn’t much
interested her, she’d moved among them as through a shoal of fish that
parted to let her pass and then regrouped behind her. She was taller
than most of them and played ball better. She liked their horses more
than she liked them. She had no way of knowing if this man was like
other men, if he had no consideration, or was good and thoughtful, she
only knew she could make no objection to him, not even when he
paused to see if she would: she could think of no reason to. He was
more like a land she’d come into than someone to know or judge. She
had no way to go back, but she didn’t think of that: he told her not to,
not to think about the future. It was the one thing he forbade. Anyway
this country she’d come into was her too: she just hadn’t known it could
be so.
He told her he was sorry he couldn’t take her to nice places or on
moonlight drives, squire her around as she deserved, but he figured
those brothers of hers wouldn’t cotton to that, and she said he was
right, they wouldn’t; it was only because she’d started at the normal
school on the hill that her time was her own now and none of their
business. She didn’t care: inside the picture palace (that’s what he called
it in his double way of speaking) they were alone with the moviegoers.
He brought her up into the little insulated booth where the great rat-
tling projectors burned away, hot as stoves, two of them because when
the film on one ran out he turned on the other, where the next reel was