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shouldn’t have, and an awful premonition filled her from her bottom to
her heart. Then when the pain passed it passed too. She said nothing.
Danny slept again.
Back in the city the two flyboys had to make a run for the embarka-
tion point, their car stuck in traffic, quick kisses and hugs and tugs
away, Poindexter turning back just at the last minute to toss Sylvia the
keys to the car before he and Danny were lost in the crowds. Sylvia got
into the driver’s seat, now overwhelmed with something that might
have been grief but that had also begun to seem like it might be regret.
Diane gave her a hug and lifted Sylvia’s chin the way men tenderly
lifted the chins of weeping girls in the movies, be brave, but Sylvia
wasn’t having it, so Diane wished her luck and all the happiness in the
world, took her case and hatbox from the back and headed through the
throng to the pier where the immense aircraft carrier was tied up. After
a long time the crew and the fliers and everyone on board came crowd-
ing the rail, a vast distance above the people who waved and called,
moms and dads and girlfriends and wives. A band played, its music
coming and going with the breeze. She saw Danny, amazed that it was
possible to identify him, it was as certain as anything, and she waved
wildly and he waved back to her, and then there was nothing left to do
but wait—even when it began to move, the carrier was going to take
forever to be gone. When Danny had to leave the high deck from which
he had looked down on her, not waving but smiling and holding her
eyes—she could tell that he was looking right at her—Diane didn’t
turn away; she sat down on her case and watched the ship, which could
now definitely be seen to be moving off, its tugs busy around it (Danny
wanted her to call the ship she but Diane couldn’t, it was silly). Its
escort, too, oilers and other ships visible now standing out to sea,
creeping out from other berths to be beside it.
The ship went on growing smaller very slowly. The crowd around
her melted away. She remembered from school a teacher saying that
you can tell the world is round because ships sailing away from shore
sink over the curve of it and disappear, first their big bodies, then the
funnels and the tiptops of their masts. Good-bye. Good-bye. She
couldn’t see that, though, because the haze out at sea erased the ship
long before it could go beyond the horizon, drawing after it the other
ships. Diane felt the thread of connection between her and Danny
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 317
drawn out infinitely thin, until it broke with a hurt to her heart she’d
known she’d have to feel, but worse than she thought it would be.
It was late in the afternoon now. She got up and took the suitcase
and the other bag and started walking toward the streetcars; took the
car to Union Station, where she checked her two bags, seeming as
heavy as gold by now. Van Damme Aero ran their own bus service
from the station around to the plant; she’d taken the bus often, bright
yellow like a school bus, Van Damme’s slim cartoon plane painted on
its side, as though pushing the roly-poly bus along on its own curling
speed line. Tomorrow first thing she’d go out there. In her handbag
were her marriage license and birth certificate. She’d worked there
before, on the Sword bomber, and she thought they’d give her a full-
time job in a minute, the wife of an airman. For a time she’d leave out
the part about being pregnant.
When her mother was eighteen and just enrolled in nursing school,
first in her family to go that far, she’d found out she was pregnant,
with Pablo as he would come to be, and she’d dropped out to marry
and have her baby and take care of her man. And no matter that
Pablito was everything to her, sun around which her planet turned,
face always to him, she would still press her hand to her heart in grief
and hurt when she thought of the degree she could have got, the white
cap she’d have worn, the doctors’ offices and hospitals she could have
worked in. Diane in her senior year had won the scholarship to St.
Anne’s College for Women, the letter was there at home on the mantel
next to the photo of Pablo in uniform. So Diane couldn’t go home, tell
them that all of that was for nothing, that she’d got a baby, been mar-
ried by a JP, was going to be an Allotment Annie and sit on her culo
just getting bigger and cashing her fifty dollars a month. When she
had the job she’d get a room, somewhere. Her mother never came
downtown, her friends wouldn’t tell. It was as far as her thinking had
reached.
She ate a hot dog at the station buffet, thinking she needed some-
thing, some nutrition, the baby too, but almost before she finished it
she knew it had been a bad idea, and she spent some time in the ladies’
lounge till it was all expelled. She wiped her lips with the stiff toilet
paper and drank water from a paper cup. The attendant, small and
dark as a troll, watched her with hostile eyes, proffering a towel, but
318 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
that would mean a tip. She left the toilets and sat in a broad leather
armchair in the lounge and for a while knew nothing.
When she woke she somehow knew, even in that place without win-
dows, that darkness had come.
Where would she go now? Everyone knew that every place you
might look for somewhere to stay was overwhelmed with applicants,
that every shed and backhouse had a tenant in it, people were sleeping
on the cement floors of garages and in the basements of unfinished
houses roofed over with tar paper; hotels were impossible, even if
Diane had dared to check into one all by herself; the YWCA was full
every day. She could stay right here, in this chair that had seemed to
become her friend, but she felt sure that the attendant would put her
out before dawn. She got to her feet.
She could walk for a while. Something could turn up. She did walk,
one second per step, wearing away an hour and another hour. Evening
was soothing, the dark blue sky reminding her of childhood and trips
downtown to the movies. Even as she thought this she saw ahead a
movie theater, its great marquee projecting over the street, its tall sign
rising with the name vista and the lines of lights chasing themselves
around the edges. A lot of people milling around out front, a lot of them
kids it looked like. Diane didn’t notice the title of the show playing; she
was only drawn to the booth where tickets were sold, as though to the
gatekeeper of a realm of safety and refuge. Twenty cents. She passed
inside. More children, coming out of the curtained entrance to the audi-
torium, going in again, sitting on the steps to the balcony looking weary
or dejected, or running wildly. An usherette in pursuit like a comic cop.
Diane went into the darkness and found a seat; the feature was just
starting. It was called No Room at the Inn. Diane knew the names of
the young people who would play the main parts but hadn’t seen them
in a picture before. The music covered her and filled her at once, like a
kind of warm nourishing syrup, and she sank lower in her seat. Snow
was falling in a dark city, people hurrying through the streets. The two
young people had just arrived from somewhere else, they had an old car
that was almost out of gas; she wore a white kerchief tied under her
chin that seemed both humble and rich; he was unshaven and his pale