miscarriage to go to work again at Van Damme, they were offering
jobs out here, and Diane signed on. She’d make more money and be far
from that town, those places, from the movie-land hope that any day
he’d come flying in again. Far from her mother’s great sad reproachful
pitying eyes, big enough to drown in. But now and then she wished,
well she didn’t know what she wished. Ay mamí. She put her hot cheek
against the cool of the glass and waited for it all to pass.
Drawn through the nation, and passing somewhere near Ponca City, is
that line below which everyone’s glad to see furious summer depart
and the cooler weather come. Autumn nights the height of felicity,
sweet as June up north.
Pancho Notzing on such a night approached the Van Damme Aero
Community Center, which formed the middle box of a big plain build-
ing; the box on the left was the men’s dormitory, the one on the right
the women’s. Both used the Center, entering from their own wings:
Pancho was reminded of the great meetinghouses of the Shakers, to
which men and women came by different ways, to meet and dance and
praise God in ecstasies.
He carried his jacket, neatly folded, over one arm. There were many
on the path with him, coming from the houses of Henryville, from
their suppers at the Dining Commons, from the far town, in groups
and twos and threes, going in by the double doors, which gave out
breaths of music when they opened and then closed again. Within,
there were not all those satisfactions and challenges and innocent
delights for the flesh and the spirit that would be offered, expected,
assumed in the true Harmonious City: but there were more of them
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 327
than Pancho had known in any human institution he had ever been
part of. Pancho Notzing believed, though he dared not say it aloud
until it began to come true—if it ever in his lifetime even began to
come true—that enough human gratification could actually change the
world, the weather, and the earth. Make the crops more abundant,
fruits sweeter; the tundra bloom with grains. The days more provident.
The nights and the air like this.
Well maybe it could begin. Maybe—Pancho’s heart dilated at the
thought—maybe it already had. Could it be that the heedless extrava-
gances of war funding had combined with the genius of a single man,
Henry Van Damme, to enact, to produce in concrete block and glass
brick and Homasote and organization charts, what he, Pancho Notz-
ing, had only been able to dream of and plan and think about? Pancho’d
planned, down to the minutiae, for human happiness and its provision,
because it was in the minutiae that Harmony existed or did not. Henry
Van Damme had planned likewise, and planned welclass="underline" Pancho simply
could not deny it, however many faults he could find. For a moment,
the first in his life, Pancho felt an impulse to hero worship. Henry Van
Damme might be a Bestopian greater than himself.
But perhaps he was only induced to think so because of the present
happiness he felt.
He came to the doors of the Community Center and entered in.
The walls of the wide entrance were covered with announcements
printed and lettered, stenciled and handwritten. Tonight the Pax Play-
ers were doing scenes from Shakespeare; tickets were free, but the pur-
chase of a War Savings Stamp was urged. The debate team was
practicing tonight for its upcoming meet with Panhandle A&M, the
thesis being “Farmers Should Not Be Draft Exempt.” The course in
Small Engine Repair was canceled for lack of interest. The Photogra-
phy Club expedition to Osage Country was tomorrow. The movie
tonight was The Arizona Kid with Roy Rogers.
While people turned off to this or that door or stair leading to vari-
ous activities, Pancho kept on until he heard the echoey piano, already
beginning. He came to the studio door and opened it. No it was no
credit to Henry Van Damme that he had brought into this unlovely
state so many people, mixed their multiple passions together in combi-
nations too many to calculate. But here (he thought) they were, and
328 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
what their freedom and Association could body forth was up to them.
To us, he thought.
The piano had begun a waltz, but the instructor halted the piano
player while she sorted her class into couples. She turned to Pancho,
entering with solemn tread as into a church, and waved to him. He’d
thought, when first he’d seen her here, that she was not someone who
merely closely resembled the divine Clara Bow, It girl, freedom embod-
ied, but the movie star herself: it was absurd, impossible, but heart
lifting for a moment. And the real person who took his hand and wel-
comed him in had the advantage over Clara—Clara, his great secret
impossible love, his Dulcinea—because she was after all a warm, living
woman actually present to him.
“Hi there, Mr. Notzing,” she said in Clara’s own insinuating gay
whine. “We’re making up partners, but we’ve an odd number tonight,
so I’ll be yours, all right? We’re going to start with a waltz, all right,
and then we’re going to try guess what?”
He smiled and went to her and didn’t try to guess.
Over at the Bomb Bay meanwhile, Prosper and Diane were at their
table, gossiping happily about the plant and people each of them knew,
he certainly was a talker, he was like Danny in that respect though
Danny was more dismissive of things that girls noticed. So it seemed.
Danny’d listen but pretty quickly his eyes would go away. Why was she
thinking about Danny anyway? She got up to get herself another Cuba
libre, and one for Prosper too.
After a while the band finished what Diane thought was a pretty
short set of numbers and claimed they’d be back. Cigarette smoke and
the day’s heat hung in the air. A smell of petroleum prevailed through-
out.
“Know what would be great?” she said.
“What?”
“A drive. A night drive. Cool. Did you know there’s a river just over
there a ways?”
“I didn’t.”
“You don’t explore. Did you know there’s Indians very close by?”
“Yes I knew that.”
“I’d like a drive,” she said.
At that moment Prosper in amazement saw Pancho Notzing come
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 329
onto the floor, with a blond woman taller than himself on his arm, a
woman dressed for dancing.
“I don’t drive, myself,” he said. He intended to make it sound like a
choice.
“Well I do,” she said. “Where I come from, everybody does.” She
regarded him with solemn certitude. “Every body.”
Prosper made no answer to that but said, “Well if you want to take
a walk, maybe we can get a car.”
“Swell,” she said. “One more drink.”
“Really?”
“Oh Prosper,” she said rising. “Don’t be a better-notter.”
The band was playing a waltz as Prosper and Diane went out, and
the three women were singing mournfully about love and loss, and
Pancho and his friend were turning each other with regal care.
The moon looked huge, the plant was far behind, the river—there was a
river—was a trickle at the end of a dirt road, they’d almost slid off the
bank and into it. Prosper’s heart had turned cold when they’d discov-
ered the key of Pancho’s Zephyr actually already in the ignition; he’d
supposed without much thought that they wouldn’t be able to find it,