her on the bed, the other bed from hers and Bunce’s, maybe just too
weary to resist him, and he embraced her from behind and reached
around to touch her. He pushed down her damp pajamas, his hand
searching in the fastness of her thick hair. She lay against him as still as
a doll or a corpse (he’d never lain with either of those), but he did as Vi
had taught him, wondering if maybe it only worked with Vi no matter
what Vi said, but she seemed to melt against him, small adjustments of
her into him, until he felt her breath quicken as though unwillingly,
and hot with hope, as well as with the sound and feel of her, he’d kept
on until she tensed suddenly with an animal’s grrr, shook, and then
softened; and slept. That was all. Every week a letter came for her from
Bunce, somewhere in basic training: Prosper saw the envelopes. The
number of glass Zonitor capsules in Connie’s box, stoppered with
white rubber, ceased going down.
Early in June the Allied armies landed in France. Even people who never
cared to follow the battles, who didn’t take out their atlases when the
President suggested they should in order to understand his radio chats,
now gathered at the radio and opened the papers, or listened to others
who read from theirs aloud. Women with men in the services, sons and
brothers and husbands; boys waiting for a call-up; older men remem-
bering France in 1918. Connie in the hot night, hoarse from shouting
all day over the plant noise, sat on the step of Pancho and Prosper’s
house and listened to Rollo read Ernie Pyle’s column about what the
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 291
beach in Normandy had looked like after those days, when the battle
had gone on into the interior and it was silent there. Prosper lay asleep
on his bed, and Adolph, who often as not was now Andy even to his
mother, lay asleep next to him. Rollo read about the vast wastage Ernie
Pyle had seen, the scores of trucks and tanks gone under the waters
and lost, landing craft upended on the shore, the big derricks on tracks
stuck in the sand or wounded and inoperable, the half-tracks hit by
shells, spilling supplies and ammunition and office equipment, type-
writers and telephones and filing cabinets all smashed and useless.
Great spools of wire and rifles rusting and the corners of dozens of
jeeps buried in the sand poking out. And Ernie said it didn’t matter,
that unlike the young men buried too in the sand or being collected for
burial, that stuff didn’t count, there was so much more where that
came from, replacements a hundred and a thousand times over, you
couldn’t imagine how much more, a steady stream pouring ashore from
that great flotilla of ships standing off to sea. Two young German pris-
oners staring out at it all in dull amazement.
Even in this yard at the far edge of Henryville the sound of B-30
engines being tested, starting, winding down, starting.
Connie asked Rollo: “Why can’t they do that without a war?”
Rollo looked up from the paper, shook it, out of habit, but didn’t
look back down at it; waited for Connie to explain what she meant.
“I mean why can’t we just do this all the time, the way we’re doing,
that we’ve got so good at. Not to provide for war but just to provide for
everyone. The way everyone’s provided for here. Not just the pay, but
everything.”
“Well for one thing,” Rollo said, “because the government had to
borrow the money for all that. The country’s going into debt making
this vast amount of stuff that when the war is over no one will want
anymore—guns and bombs and bullets and tanks. And they’ll still
have to pay back what they borrowed.”
“But why can’t we just turn around and order the same system, the
one big system, to make things that people do want. Like those refrig-
erators we all have here, or new cars, or better houses, or anything.
Then people would be making a lot of money making the things and
also be able to spend it, because the things they’d be making would be
things people want.”
292 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“But who’d decide what people want?” Rollo had come to like
Connie, and respect her too, and when his health wouldn’t permit him
to work, which wouldn’t be long from now, he intended to put in her
name to replace him as foreman, or forelady he guessed she’d be called.
It wasn’t unheard of. “Now it’s the government and the army that
decide, and sometimes they’re wrong. What if they’ve built the B-30
for nothing, what if it’s not the airplane that’s needed? Well, who’d
care, if the war got won? Waste wouldn’t matter, like the paper here
says. But after the war that wouldn’t work—lots of things made that
nobody wants to pay for, and the government not there to borrow
money to buy it. It’d just go unsold. Businesses would go under. Jobs
lost. Depression.”
He put aside the paper and picked up his Roy Smeck model banjo.
Connie didn’t know how he could be so sure about this. Maybe there
was a way to know. A science of knowing what people want. Their
Passions, like old Mr. Notzing talked about. Not all people all the
time, but enough. And not just the necessary things but silly things
they’d want to buy that are fun and amusing for a while. Fashions. Sex
appeal. But would there be any way to know enough about all people,
each individual, so the system could work? You couldn’t just order
them all to go to Bethlehem to be taxed. They’d somehow have to do it
themselves, associate themselves countrywide and maybe worldwide
with their Passional Series of like-minded or like-feeling people, and be
able to know hour by hour what all of them were doing and wanting
and getting or not getting. Not even a worldwide telephone tree would
be able to do that. Nothing could.
She looked at the radium dial of the new wristwatch on her wrist,
which she’d bought out of her last paycheck, which had gone right into
the Van Damme bank, she’d never seen it at all.
“Time to go,” she said.
Connie’s wristwatch and the big black-and-white clocks high up on the
walls of the Assembly Building agreed that it was lunchtime, and bleat-
ing horns announced it for those deep in the guts of a Pax where they
couldn’t see. Connie’d been going over the wiring with a girl whose
badge said her name was Diane, who watched Connie and listened to
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 293
her in a kind of beautiful lazy way. She didn’t fidget or get annoyed
when Connie kept her there after the horn sounded, let’s just get this
done, though her dark eyes withdrew a little.
Just finishing up when she saw Prosper coming toward her, as he
did now every day almost at this hour. Her friend Prosper.
“Okay,” she said to Diane, the noise in this shop ceasing.
Then Diane saw the inspector’s face alter, and something flew into
it because of something that she saw. Diane turned to see what it was.
The inspector was already climbing down from the platform, danger-
ously fast. At first Diane thought it was the crippled man coming this
way with a smile on his face, but then that man looked behind him, as
though he too understood Connie had seen something big. And Diane
watched her rush past that fellow to a man in uniform now coming
down the floor fast, snatching the cap from his dark curls and opening