already loaded and strung up, and seamlessly the picture changed from
one to the other. He brought her to the little double-glass window in
the wall where the picture could be watched, and showed her the marks
that appear for an instant in the corner of the screen, that warned him
the reels would need to be changed in five minutes, in three, in ten sec-
onds, now: and she realized she’d seen those X s and dots forever, and
not understood them. Once, as she stood there to look out, he came
behind her, drew up her skirt and gently eased down her pants, she
lifted a leg so he could slip them off. She held herself against the padded
272 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
wall, legs wide apart for him to enter, still watching through the
window the great silvery faces come and go; sometimes the actors
looked her way, speaking as though to her, troubled or threatening or
surprised by joy, but without words, for she could hear nothing they
said, could hear nothing at all but the uncaring projectors, and the
people out there looking at the screen couldn’t hear the sounds he and
she made either: she knew they couldn’t, and still she tried to be quiet
as he rose up within her beyond what she’d thought possible. Five min-
utes till done, three minutes, ten seconds, now.
When winter came her mother began to worsen from whatever it
was that she had, that ate her away from within. Her father could
hardly speak of it; her brothers tried to go on acting in the same ways
they had always done, belligerent or jaunty or uncaring, intent on their
jobs or their games or their pecking order, and Vi could understand—it
seemed not to be in them to rise to this, which didn’t mean they weren’t
hurt inside: only she couldn’t talk to them. She had only her man in the
movie theater to talk to. He listened, too: calm and quiet and unafraid.
Until (she could tell it) he could go no further. She knew she shouldn’t
hand him something he couldn’t fix. She felt she cost him something
just by being so hurt by it, so confused and hurt, herself: she had made
herself less his, less what he wanted, she subtracted from herself some
quality or value he deserved to have. Ever after she’d have to tell herself
it wasn’t for that reason—not for that reason alone, not mostly, not at
all—that he’d moved away.
In the center of the proscenium of the old theater were plaster leaves
and flowers surrounding two masks, one of them with wide mouth
turned down in a frozen rictus of awful grief, the other in an even
worse contortion of awful laughter. No picture showing: it was the
middle of the morning but as eternally dark as ever here, the dim house
lights on. He told her he was leaving town, selling up, heading out. The
way he said it was more gentle but not otherwise so different from the
way he’d say anything, any jaunt he’d propose, any scheme to make it
big or see the world. She sat in the seat beside him in the grip of an
awful fear, that there was a right thing she might say, one thing, that
would make him retract what he’d told her and change him back into
what he had been just before, but she didn’t know what that right thing
was and wouldn’t ever know it.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 273
“Why?” she said at last: the one word, one syllable, that she could
manage without tears. She looked straight ahead.
“Couple of reasons,” he said. “There’s some gentlemen who’ve
learned about my little enterprise here, people I knew a long time ago;
they’d like to have a talk with me and I don’t believe I want to start up
that old acquaintance.”
That was language from the movies. She had to believe it contained
a truth about him. She thought of saying he could hide out at the ranch:
but that was just more movie talk. She didn’t know who he was: never
had.
“And,” he said. “Well, just time to move on. Never been happy long
in one place.” He turned to look at her, she could sense it but wouldn’t
turn herself. “Hadn’t been for you, I’d have been gone a while ago.”
She had to go, she had snatched these moments from her mother
and her family, she’d told them lies that weren’t going to last long, she
had to leave and go out into the day. She got up and pushed past him
like a moviegoer when the picture’s reached the place where she came
in. There was no one in the hot street or in the store, she could weep
and cry aloud in an agony that was like (she’d learned the word in
music class at the school) a descant on the cry of grief always in her
then for her mother and herself.
When her mother was dead and buried, though, and he was still
intent on leaving and had announced the closing of the theater, she
made a spectacle of herself; she was seen banging on his door in the
hotel and people talked and she ran from the house and her brothers
knew where she was headed and followed her, pulling at her arms as
though she were ten years old and in a tantrum, a madness possessing
her that she would deny possessed her. She’d deny even to herself that
she had to see him and then find herself looking up at the lighted
window of his office at midnight not knowing how she’d got there. Her
mother not a month in her grave.
She was waiting there loitering the day he came down from the
office with a stack of file folders and a tin money-box that he put into
that cream and gray convertible he had, and a small pistol too in a hol-
ster, belt wrapped around it, which he put in the glove compartment.
Two alligator suitcases, a little shabby, were already in there. She could
say nothing, a clear coldness all through her worse than the fiery obliv-
274 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
ion. He nodded to her as though she were a dim acquaintance he had
nothing against. When she didn’t respond in any way, he held up the
files to her.
“Like to invest in a picture palace? Steady income.”
“Stop it,” she said. “You stop it. I’ll never go to the pictures again.”
“Oh honey. You will. You’ll see. Plenty of good pictures, always more
in fact, brand-new, all-talking all-singing all-dancing. You’ll see.”
Everything he owned was in the car. He had to pass her to get to the
driver’s seat, and as he did he seemed to convince himself of some-
thing, and he turned back and took her and kissed her and touched
her. Then he got in the car and started it. She could hear the gears
engage and it moved away, leaving tracks in the dust of the road, not
seeming to grow any smaller though as it went.
Three years passed.
The train blew its whistle for a grade crossing, and Shirley in the
coach seat opposite hers awoke for a moment. “Hey,” she said, and
went back to sleep. Shirley’d been married and divorced, Vi didn’t yet
know the whole tale. Outside the train window the landscape was
growing more familiar. Vi hadn’t told Shirley about the picture show.
It hadn’t ever reopened.
She’d said to Prosper Olander that you can only get your heart
broken once. She thought of it as like a horse’s broken leg: after that
they shoot you. Whatever you are afterward isn’t as alive; you can’t be
burned, but you don’t feel the fire. She’d said to Prosper that the woman
who’d left him at the stairs to the train had broken his heart, as hers
had been broken; but something about him made her think differently.
It might be that his heart was cold from the beginning, because he was