heart, but she’d done it, she had. Was the wine for her? Oh that’s so
kind, she’d never had wine like this before.
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He sat at her kitchen table while she gave her son a glass of milk,
speaking softly to him and he to her. The boy’s big brown eye fell on
Prosper now and again, maybe as Connie’s had on Francine—no,
surely a little kid wouldn’t know enough to be jealous of a man in his
house. Connie ran a bath and dunked Adolph in it, talking on and on
to him and to Prosper, who listened in a strange state of elevation,
peaceful amid a family he could imagine might be like one he could
have, while knowing it was Bunce’s, who’d take it out on him if he ever
learned of Prosper’s sitting here at Bunce’s table eating a piece of
Bunce’s own farewell cake and sipping pink wine from a tumbler.
Then after a quiet half hour spent alone with Adolph in the bed-
room, while Prosper read a comic book he found there, Connie’d come
out and shut the door softly behind her.
Prosper had intended to leave then, but of course he hadn’t, and she
hadn’t wanted him to, that seemed evident, and they talked—she talked
and he listened—and she tried the wine and said she liked it. The short
night came down, and brought a lick of breeze—she called it a lick,
tugging at the throat of her thin dress for it to enter there. Funny how,
when the air cools, the sweat starts on your brow and lip, or maybe it
was the wine. Could you put an ice cube in it? They decided you could
if you wanted.
She made him tell her about himself, and he watched what he told her
reflected in her features. He told funny stories and odd ones and she
laughed and marveled, but through all these, in her eyes and in the part-
ing of her lips and the tender double crease that came and went in the
space between her pale brows, he saw an underlying something, a hurt
for him, even when the stories were about what he was proudest of.
Then the wine was gone and they told secrets.
She asked him if she could ask him a question, and he said sure she
could, and she asked if you were, well, with a man who you loved, in
the bed, and if that person couldn’t, you know, complete what you
were doing or even get started because he couldn’t—well did that mean
he didn’t love you, did it mean he hated you, or did it not mean that?
What did it mean? And Prosper said he didn’t know because it hadn’t
happened to him, and she said it hadn’t happened to her either, she just
wondered. And she wept a little. He came to touch her.
Still he could say that he hadn’t meant to stay, hadn’t meant to be
284 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
still awake with her when the sky began to lighten again. Throughout
she was as tentative, and yet as determined, as he was: they took turns.
She never said, and he never said, No we can’t. They just could and
they did.
She was so slim and pale, breasts no bigger than apples, and yet
between her legs golden fur thick as a beast’s. Fascinating, but not to
be remarked on, he knew that much. It crept up toward her navel and
down her thighs, and seeing it and feeling it he noticed (as he hadn’t
before) the light down on her upper lip, the soft hair of her cheeks by
her ears, and the drape of hairs over her forearms like a monkey’s.
They’d been there all along and still he’d expected a body smooth as a
statue; now he knew better. What she’d expected of him she didn’t say:
he was always unexpected, he knew, and he made no remark on that,
either, though she seemed surprised by the willingness of him and of
his eager part, as though maybe she’d expected that to be attenuated or
wasted too, like his legs. Wouldn’t have been the first time for that
either.
But he really hadn’t expected all that or counted on it, and the
proof was he’d not brought any of his Lucky brand condoms, still a
couple left. When he said something to Connie that he hoped might
make that clear— we shouldn’t, we should be careful because, you
know—she’d slipped out of the bed (near naked and aglow, as though
she drew all the small light in the house into herself) and gone to the
bathroom and then returned, a strange sweet odor about her, and just
picked up where they’d left off.
What was it? he asked, afterward, and she whispered into his ear in
the deep dark: Zonitor. What’s that? You put it, you know, up there,
and you don’t get pregnant. She’d used it for a year with Bunce and
never told him. Never told him.
A while after that they started again.
Then they’d come to the time at dawn where she’d wept about it,
how she was cheating on Bunce with a cripple, and before she could
answer his question to her (but he guessed the answer anyway because
of the way she gasped in laughter at it, at his nerve), Adolph could be
heard crying, then bawling: and in furious haste, as though the cops
were at the door, she leapt up and struggled into her dress.
He got himself together and went home. That dawn walk back. He
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 285
thought that, when and if it ever came time to assemble in memory all
the most blessed moments in his past, then these dawns when a woman
who had just allowed him into her life, maybe her heart, put him out
because she had to return to her child, her work, her self, reluctantly
from a warm bed or sometimes not so reluctantly—they would all be
among the ones he would choose, though he couldn’t say why.
9
Connie waited another day, exhausted and immobile, and then
bathed and dressed and went to get a job at Van Damme.
First thing was to bring Adolph to the nursery and get him
signed up and settled in. The nursery was in the same building
as the huge cafeteria, occupying the whole sunny southern side, the
curving spaces she’d seen in the magazine enclosing an inner space
open to the sky, a playground with flowers and a little garden where
the kids could grow their own vegetables (as she walked, Connie was
reading from the little handout they’d given her). The principle the
whole nursery and its kindergarten and classrooms went on was Learn-
ing by Doing. Prepare the child for successful adaptation to the school,
the plant, the office, and the community. Good citizenship begins in
cooperation, respect for others, and a sense of accomplishment.
It seemed a little more chaotic than that when she opened the glass
doors and a wave of child and teacher voices hit her, a storm of babble,
tears, cries of excitement. They gave you an hour or so on the clock to
stay with your child so he wouldn’t get a complex from being aban-
doned, but you didn’t have to use it if you thought everything would go
all right. Adolph clung to her as though to a rock-ribbed shore against
the breakers.
“Well hello there, little fella,” said the receptionist, bending over him,
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 287
grandmotherly and gray; she reminded Connie of the woman at the
United States Employment Office who had started her on this journey.
“What’s your name?”
Adolph made no answer, though he let go of Connie and smiled.
Mrs. Freundlich somehow hadn’t left him with a terror of strangers,
thank goodness.
“His name’s Adolph,” Connie said.
The woman lifted her brows, regarding Connie over her Ben Frank-
lin glasses.
“Well his name’s Adolph really,” Connie said. “But we always call