eye the way Veronica Lake’s did, or anyway you were supposed to
think that. “I know he does.”
“Oh sure,” another, a blonde, replied. “Khaki-wacky,” she said to
Diane, but for the other girl to hear.
“Don’t you tell me,” the other said. “You’re no better. You’re more
khaki-wacky than I’ll ever be.”
“You clap your trap.”
“Lucy Loose-pants.”
The others were laughing and half rising from their seats to cover
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 303
their friends and keep them from being heard. The khaki-wacky one
looked over to where the sailors sat together and gave them a little
brave wave, mostly for her friends’ sake, just to show them that what-
ever she was, she was going to be it unashamed. Diane stayed in her
seat. The girls were all about her age but seemed to her skilled hunt-
resses, chasing uniforms with a single-minded intensity that seemed
hot and cold at the same time.
“I’m getting a button tonight,” the Veronica Lake one said as they
pulled her back into her seat. “No bout adout it.”
“Oooh, hotsy-totsy.” The blonde blew and shook her hand, as
though the matter were too hot to touch. The other looked away, cold-
eyed, exploring the ice in her drink with the straw. Diane listened, a
little afraid they might start questioning her. She knew they were after
buttons, and had heard what getting one was supposed to mean, what
you had to do. I’ll do it but you have to give me one thing. She’d heard
that the fiercest girls carried nail scissors in their bags just to get them
with. The band started up again, a slow sweet number. Though she
hadn’t seen him come up behind her, she felt Danny the pilot lean close
to her shoulder.
“Hey, sport model.”
She turned to him a little coolly. It was rude to make reference to a
person’s height or weight or.
“I’m better at this kind of tune,” he said. He really was cute. He
offered her a hand.
“Ding-dong,” she heard the blond girl say as they went away.
The Duck finally evacuated near dawn, and the crowds that were let out
into the streets deliquesced, some walking away under their own
power, the taxi fleet bearing away the incompetent and their support-
ers. Others remained to mill, unsatisfied even yet. Smash of a dropped
bottle, girl-cries at a sudden thrown punch. One thing to do after such
a night was to go out to the broad divided avenue that led to the park—
Danny and Diane and the khaki-wacky girl, who’d snagged a soldier,
did that—and wander down amid the flowers in the center plaza; over-
head the royal palms lifted their shaggy heads on impossibly slim
stalks, black against the dawn sky growing green.
304 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“You know,” Danny said to her, “down the other way, I mean back
that way, there’s some places where you can get a room. A nice room.
They say. You don’t have to stay all night.”
“Go on,” she said.
“True.”
She kept walking, looking straight on, head held up.
“I mean,” Danny said, by way of withdrawing what hadn’t quite
been a suggestion. They walked on, around them others, the last of the
last, until they came to the big gates of the park, and inside everything
was green and shadowed, and you could see (but you didn’t look too
closely) couples on the benches and on the grass, the tip of a cigarette
maybe alight. Star-scattered on the grass. You went on till you got to
the zoo, because the idea was—Diane acting as though she’d long
known it, though this was the first time, the first time she’d been out all
night with the others, and Danny not paying attention yet, not being
from around here, not knowing—the idea was to come down at dawn
after a night at the Lucky Duck or the Bomber or Bimbo’s or places
without famous names like those, to listen to the animals waking up.
Diane and Danny fell out of the line, like weary soldiers hors de
combat and giving up; they found a stone bench. For a while they
talked—neither of them was much of a drinker, though they tried to
be, and tired as they were from the night and the dancing they weren’t
comatose like so many. He told her about where he had come from, far
corner of the nation from hers. He was just out of flight training and
would ship out for Pearl next week. Then who knows. Shouldn’t even
have said that much. Diane felt an instant of huge grief, and then
warmth, then something like relief, then it didn’t matter: there were so
many gone and coming back and going out again, you wanted to care
but you couldn’t care. Then they kissed, blending each into the other in
a way that surprised Diane, because she’d kissed some boys but she’d
never had this before, when what you felt moved to do was just what
somebody else wanted to do, you were sure of it, like you couldn’t be
wrong and didn’t need to worry. She pushed his hands away, but when
obediently he withdrew them, she pulled them toward her again. The
lions, awakened, started to greet the Sun their father; startled birds
arose from the trees around them. Danny looked up, as though the
wild sound came from above.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 305
“What the hay?” he said, but she drew him back. Other animals
began to make noises, animals you didn’t recognize and couldn’t imag-
ine, grunting and hollering; the big cats screamed, the baboons too but
differently; the macaws and great crested exotics shrieked and hooted
as day came on. Some of the humans joined in, in mockery or just
catching the spirit. The Shore Patrol was coming through the park,
fanning out, looking for their own.
They would get called V-girls in the papers and the comic magazines, in
cartoons about willing girls with flipping skirts and lost undies amid
wide-eyed delighted soldiers, and everybody could figure out that the V
didn’t just stand for Victory, though the jokes about doing her part
and all that were constant, and the girls would sometimes even deploy
them against one another—they could be cruel to their competition in
ways that would have surprised the boys they competed for. But they
weren’t asking for money, or at any rate never considered those who
did ask for money as belonging in the same sorority as themselves.
Which made no difference to the civil and military authorities, since a
girl could give a soldier a dose for free as easily as she could charge him
for it (as the little booklets and the big posters filled with variants of
the same cartoons kept telling him), and keeping the men off sick list
and out of the infirmary was the big concern.
The Button Babes (as they called themselves to themselves) did get a
lot of money spent on them, which wasn’t the same thing. And anyway
they were usually ready to spend it too if necessary, on their boys;
except that you learned quickly that the offer didn’t have the right
effect most of the time, maybe only late at night when nothing mat-
tered, when it was like shooting fish in a barrel and not much more fun
(that’s what Diane thought). No, the shiff-shiff of rubbed bills and
clink of dollars and smaller coins had to go only one way, had to be
shown and seen and then spent, the BBs didn’t ask why, or why the
transactions did what they did, raised the temperature, rolled the ball
faster. Cigar lifted in his grinning teeth as he peeled bills happily from