his arms to her.
“So. He’s back, I guess.”
The crippled man had come to Diane’s station, and seemed to be
hiding behind the scaffolding of the platform.
“Who’s back?”
“That inspector’s husband. I mean I guess he’s her husband.”
“Her name’s Connie,” Diane said, thinking the guy surely knew
that. “Looks like she’s not gonna come back and finish this.” Connie
and her serviceman were wrapped in each other, oblivious, drinking
each other in. Workers went by them, some smiling. Diane climbed
down.
“Were you,” the man with the crutches asked her, “headed for
lunch?”
“Well. Yes.”
“Walk with me,” he said, a little urgently.
He steered them not toward the cafeteria but toward a lunch wagon,
one of many that served far parts of the plant, that was drawing up not
far down the floor. It was a little trying, she found, walking with him;
not only did she have to walk with an unnatural slowness to keep from
getting ahead of him, but she also felt her body tense, as though she
needed to lend him encouragement, the way you bend and make a face
to force a pool ball to go right.
“So she was glad to see him, I guess,” he said, looking straight ahead.
294 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Well heck yes. Sure. Who wouldn’t be. You could just see it in her
eyes.”
He said nothing.
“That uniform too,” Diane said, guiltily pleased to be able to tease
him a little. “They come home in that uniform, it does something to a
girl. I can tell you.”
“Well.” He seemed to pick up the pace a little, flinging his puppet’s
feet forward. “He was gone a while, I guess. I mean not long as these
things go these days.”
“No.”
“I mean not actually gone at all, really, not yet. It’s not like he’s
back from fighting the Nazis for years.”
Diane laughed at that extravagance and at the grim face he’d pulled.
“So actually you’re a friend of hers.”
“I’d say so.”
“A special friend.”
“Well she’s got it tough,” he said. “With a kid and all and her man
gone.”
“A kid? Jeez.” Diane said nothing more for a time. “My guy’s in the
service,” she said then. “My husband.”
He looked her way, to read the face she’d said that with: it was a
sentence you heard a lot, said in different ways, with different faces.
“Army?”
“Navy. He’s a fighter pilot.” She was always shy to say it, as though
it might sound like bragging; plenty of women didn’t mind bragging,
good reason or not, she’d heard them.
“So,” he said. He’d stopped to rest, she could understand why. “My
name’s Prosper.”
“Diane.” She put out her hand, man-style, to shake.
They reached the lunch wagon, a Humphrey Pennyworth contrap-
tion with a motorbike front end and a driver in white with a billed cap
like a milkman. They got in the line. The word up ahead was that It’s-
It bars—which Henry Van Damme had ordered to be shipped out every
month from the Coast in refrigerated trucks—were now available, and
the line got a little impacted with eagerness.
“It is hard,” Prosper said, to her and not to her. “It is hard.”
She’d rushed right past him unseeing, Connie had: seeing only the
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 295
thing she aimed for. Bang into Bunce, as though he were her other half,
found again at last. He had glanced back at them and he knew. For
Bunce alone the lamps of her eyes were lit.
For that guy. For him.
Could it be that women really liked it that a man was jealous of
them? Did they like jealous men better than those like himself who
weren’t? The furies that such men were capable of in True Story, the
jealousy, it was always terrible and unwarranted and a man always had
to surrender it before the woman would once again be his. But maybe
that wasn’t true of them, only they didn’t like to admit it: maybe they
could love a man who was mean to them and cheated on them, as long
as he was deeply jealous, as long as he wanted them for himself alone.
He didn’t know and didn’t want to think so. But he felt pretty sure
that for one reason or another no woman was ever going to look at him
the way Connie had looked at Bunce as he approached, all her heart in
her face; or take hold of him as she had Bunce, her man.
“They’ve got ham sandwiches and cheese sandwiches,” Diane said,
startling him.
“Ah. Um. One of each,” he said, and she fetched them. “Thank you.”
For some reason Diane kept running into this guy Prosper on the floor
in the following days, or saw him passing by in the little Aero car with
the reporter fellow, or in the cafeteria. Of course he was pretty visible,
once you’d noticed him. They had a brief conversation now and then
that never seemed quite to come to an end, one more thing to say that
he didn’t say.
Then she found a note in her little mail cubby at the dormitory. It
was addressed just Diane, with a beautiful question mark after it of a
kind she didn’t think ordinary writers made. She unfolded it and it was
all written in the same kind of beautiful script that only appeared in
magazines.
Hello Diane, I got your name off your name tag the other day
and I’m guessing this is you. It seemed to me if you don’t mind
my saying so that you were looking a little down lately, and I
just wanted to remind you that over in the Bomb Bay tonight
296 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
there’s a real band playing, not just records, and I thought you
might like to go listen, and dance—not that I’m claiming any
ability to dance! Anyway I thought it might be fun, and it starts
at 8 P.M. Your friend, Prosper Olander.
Sweet, she thought. She fanned herself with it; the day had already
grown hot, too hot for the time of year. It was going to be awful in that
plant.
Why shouldn’t she go, anyway. What harm was there in it? She
could maybe cheer him up too, a nice fellow, that funny crush he’d had
on a married woman, married to a GI. She’d go: it wasn’t like you were
exactly stepping out with an actual fellow anyway.
A real band. She remembered the noise of the big band in the Lucky
Duck, the mob on the dance floor, the sweet smell of the 7-and-7s on
the table: it hadn’t been much more than a year ago, but it seemed
more than long ago, it was as though those weren’t memories of her
grown-up life but scenes from her childhood, or from the life of a kid
sister she’d never had, a crazy kid sister she’d left back there and would
never see again.
PART FOUR
1
Past midnight, and the Lucky Duck on Fourth Avenue was full to
overflowing, as a continuous wash of people entering through
two sets of double doors arose into the bars and restaurants and
seemed to displace another bunch that spilled back out into the
street and streamed away toward the lesser venues or toward the street-
cars and the late shifts, the naval bases and the ships.
Harold Weintraub’s Lucky Duck—that was the full name of the
place, the name the maître d’s spoke with unctuous exactness on answer-