him Andy.”
“Andy,” said the woman, whose own name was Blanche. It said so
on her badge. She filled out some forms, asked if Connie would like to
have the cost deducted from her pay when she got a position, and
whether her son had any medical problems. No he didn’t, he was fine.
“Well then, come on in, Andy, and we’ll make you a card with your
name, and get you all settled in.” Blanche set off unafraid into the pan-
demonium beyond, sure-footed and broad-beamed, and Connie and
Adolph went after her, his new name awaiting him, everything await-
ing him, everything.
At Intake, they spurned Connie’s little test paper with a smile, and
nobody asked her for a birth certificate, though she’d brought it, which
made her wonder why they ever had up north. It was as though the
grimy and outworn Bull plant and its offices were located in some
former age, as though she’d been transported into a grown-up world
from a messy playroom. Next day she dropped Adolph, Andy, at the
nursery and watched him totter off, as ready for this as she was. She
started on the line, turning bolts with a driver, but as soon as she could
she began looking at the training courses that you could take, get a
better pay rate, do more interesting work. There were classes in Draft-
ing, Engine Setup, Metal Lathe Operation, Blueprints, Calibrations.
There were so many of them offered at so many different hours for dif-
ferent lengths of time that Rollo Stallworthy had made up his own
computer to keep them straight, a piece of cardboard with wheels of
cardboard pinned to it and little isinglass windows that lined up to
show the date and the times and the rooms and who had signed up for
which.
288 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
One of Henry Van Damme’s ideas that his brother and his partners
had rejected was a plan for training all new employees not just in one
operation but successively in several—riveting, welding, engines, gun-
nery calibration, subassembly, anything—so that eventually in the
course of a single shift a person could take a break from one job and
do another for a couple of hours, and then another. It’d keep you alert,
he argued, keep boredom from setting in (he feared boredom intensely
himself), make for happier workers. Variety is the spice of life. The
engineers and efficiency experts reacted with horror. The constant
traffic of people from workstation to workstation would cost time, so
would the training; most of the workers coming in were barely capable
of learning one simple job, let alone five or six—this wasn’t like down
on the farm, where you milk cows in the morning and hoe corn in the
afternoon. Very well, Van Damme at last said: but you’d better be
ready for high turnover, and plenty of new trainees, and that’s time
and trouble too. If you haven’t ever done it before, industrial labor is
an awful shock, one or two simple motions performed every couple of
minutes for forty-eight hours a week, plus overtime—plenty can’t take
it, and that didn’t surprise Henry Van Damme any. Without bringing it
up again he continued to brood on the matter and work up plans for
how it could be done. The papers are in his archives today.
Connie signed up for Billing and Comptometry. When she was
given a job, she was also sent to study Wiring Procedures. She’d be an
inspector when she’d mastered those, a white band around her left arm
with that word written on it, and the power—the duty—to make the
workers whose work she inspected do it over if it wasn’t done right.
The first time she did that, and the woman whose work had failed
inspection looked up wan and lost and hurt, Connie had smiled at her
in a buck-up way and then gone off to the john and cried. Never again,
though. Among the inspectors in her shop she was the most detested,
particularly by the men: but she’d learned something about men, at the
Bull plant and then here. Men—not all men but a lot, maybe most—
didn’t know everything that they acted as though they knew, and
weren’t as good at things as they let you think, tools and machinery
and the tasks that those things were used for.
“They pat you on the head,” Connie said to Prosper while Adolph
got his supper, “or they look like they would if they could. Like you’re
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 289
a child. You ask them a question, they get all annoyed, as though sure,
they’ve got it all under control. Then you look at what they did and it’s
not right. It’s just not right.”
Prosper—glad not to be one of the they she described, nobody could
say he’d ever lorded it over man or mouse—shook his head in sympa-
thy. He was all in favor of her, himself. He admired her for the hard
skilled work she did, and the courses she studied for in her spare time,
and the way in which, despite all that, she cared for her son with what
seemed single-minded intensity. What he wondered was if she also
undertook those many things so as to be too busy to have to decide to
go to bed with him. He hadn’t had a lot of welcome that way, quick as
he was to pick up on any that he got. Sunday she’d take the church bus
to St. Mary’s in Ponca City, in her nicest dress and a hat; Sunday was
his only day off, and hers. When Adolph’s, no Andy’s, supper was done
she planned (she told him) to take a long bath and wash her hair and go
to bed, and he understood her, the way she said it, very clearly. Not
that she didn’t want him there: she seemed to need him, greeted him
with ardent hugs as soon as he’d got inside and away from neighbors’
eyes. He’d stay till he wasn’t wanted, then head home alone; come back
another day, to knock on the subletter’s door after night had fallen.
“I just can’t help thinking all the time how jealous Bunce would be
if he found out,” she said to him when once he pressed her. “He’d go
crazy. Thinking of that makes me feel, well, not so much like loving.”
She sat at the kitchen table, where she was filling in a Suggestions
form. Ever since she became an inspector she seemed to notice a lot of
things that could be done better. Her Suggestions were growing longer.
Sometimes they needed two pages.
“He is jealous,” Prosper said thoughtfully. “I don’t know how he can
be so jealous when he . . . The things he’s done. It’s not exactly fair.”
“All men are jealous,” Connie said. “They just are.”
“Well,” Prosper said. “I’m not.”
“No?” She looked up from the paper and twiddled her pencil. “Not
jealous?”
“I’m not,” he said. “But I can be envious.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well,” he said. The distinction was one he’d read about in an article
called “Obstacles to Your Complete Happiness” in The Sunny Side long
290 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
ago. “The jealous person wants what he has all to himself. The envious
person wants what he wants, but he doesn’t mind if other people have it
too.”
“So you can share,” Connie said smiling. “Adolph’s learning to
share, in the nursery.”
“Good.”
“That doesn’t sound like envy.”
“It is if you don’t get what you want that someone else has,” Pros-
per said. “Or if another person gets more. It can drive you nuts.”
Connie looked down at the form she’d been working on. “He is my
husband,” she said.
When she was done with her bath that night she let him just lie with