“All I want,” she said, “is a drink and a steak. If I don’t fall asleep
first.”
“Actually,” he said, “that might be a tall order. The cafeteria’s the
only eats for a long way.”
“Then that’ll do,” said Martha.
“For a drink,” he said, “there’s the Bomb Bay.”
“The what?”
He explained, she thanked him, gave him a wave, and caught up
with the other women. Meanwhile Horse had gone back for the car
and now drew up beside him.
“What did you learn?” he asked.
Prosper didn’t answer, and climbed into the car, thinking that some
word, some name, had occurred in those minutes that meant a lot, but
in a way he couldn’t grasp, and he kept thinking about it as Horse,
talking a mile a minute, drove him back and dropped him at the
office.
“Get those films developed,” he said, as he drove away.
“Yessir.”
On Prosper’s desk lay an envelope containing the new Upp ’n’ Adam
cartoons for him to letter. He sat down and slid them out, Bristol board
eleven-by-fourteen inches, on which the artist had sketched his picture
of the two fools—fat Upp blithely driving his forklift to disaster as
Adam points at him and calls out to the viewer. The line that Prosper
was to add was “Adam sez: If you see something, SAY something!!!”
Prosper didn’t think the picture was very expressive of what he took
that phrase to mean, that the bosses wanted you to watch out for pil-
fering, waste, slacking, even sabotage: it was about getting workers to
watch one another and report to management. Well it was hard to pic-
ture that using the two friends, with Adam turning Upp in. The blue
lines of the initial sketch were overlaid in black ink, improving it here
and there; those blue lines, the first thoughts, would magically disap-
pear when the whole was photographed.
If you see something, say something.
Prosper remembered what it was that Martha the pilot had said that
had tinkled a bell in his brain. San Francisco: she’d said San Francisco.
338 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
He got up, hoisting himself so fast he nearly tumbled over. If you
see something say something. He made it out the door and down
through the plant, people calling hellos after him, and toward the caf-
eteria. If she hadn’t gone there, then the dorm, or the Bomb Bay. He
was already speaking to her, making a case. Sure it’s against the regu-
lations but hell what isn’t, listen her husband’s an airman, an airman,
a fighter pilot. And who’m I, I’m, well, I heard the story and gosh she
seems like such a swell kid, so young, I’ll tell you something, she was
married one day and he was off to the Pacific, she hasn’t seen him
since. Her husband. Shot down in the Pacific, a hero. It’s important,
really. And Martha, you’re the pilot, aren’t you, and what you say goes
in that plane, isn’t that right?
The faster he spoke to Martha the faster he walked, hardly feeling
the effort, the din of his blood in his ears. Probably, probably, it’d be
harder to convince Diane of this than Martha, you could tell Martha
was fearless and made up her own mind, but Diane? It’d work, it would,
she’d just have to see, he’d make her do it. He invoked Mary Wilma,
prayed to Mary Wilma for power, he’d be Mary Wilma and make
Diane do his plan, by his will and by his certainty, he’d.
He stopped still, not only because his arms had at last got in touch
with his brain and said No more, and his breath was gone: also because
he had another thought. The thought was to not do this at all, no, to
forget about it and not tell Diane and forget he ever thought of it.
Because that might be better for him.
In the Bomb Bay she’d said to him I don’t even remember what he
looks like.
But he was here, Prosper, before her. She didn’t need to try to
remember him. Those good-bye marriages didn’t need to last, every-
body said they didn’t last. She said this was the worst thing that’d ever
happened to her, but what if it was for the best, what if she forgot
Danny more and more until he was gone altogether, and he himself
was still here, not going anywhere.
And alive. At the war’s end he’d certainly be still alive.
At that shameful thought he started again toward the cafeteria. No.
No. She was beautiful and she’d known how to be kind to him without
diminishing him or treating him like an infant, she was just good at
that and so he knew she was good inside, and inside her too was his
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 339
own baby. But he had no right. Just because of that he had no right. No
fair even making her the offer, posing a choice, it could only hurt her to
hear it: the war was winding down and he’d soon be out of a job,
maybe for life, and what kind of a prize did that make him? She couldn’t
say yes. He’d have to advise her not to. If he was her.
His heart hurt. Actually, even though the heart beat hard, it was the
muscles of his chest that hurt, and the bronchia and throat through
which the burning breath rushed; but he’d have said it was his heart.
He reached the cafeteria, the vast spread of tables and people, not so
crowded though at this hour, and after a minute they were easy to
spot, the four of them at their table, it was as though the eyes of the
other diners there, turning toward them, pointed them out to him.
Well so what, he thought. What he had, or would have, was a son,
maybe a daughter, growing up somewhere, at one end of the nation or
the other, and nobody’d know he was the father, nobody but Diane
and he, and even she might talk herself into forgetting one day, though
he hoped not, it wouldn’t be fair.
Danny’d never know, but he knew. He knew what men don’t know,
what they don’t get to know. They think they know but they don’t
know, because they aren’t told, because they don’t ask. But he knew,
more than all of them, and better than that, he knew that he knew.
And that was enough, would be enough, for now.
“Hi, Martha,” he said, a little breathless. She’d watched him make
his way across the floor with a kind of forbearance, not unkind, smil-
ing even. She lifted her face in inquiry. “So. Can I ask you a ques-
tion?”
She nodded and pointed to the chair opposite her, and he felt her
eyes on him as he maneuvered to sit, unlock his braces, and turn to her,
now an ordinary man. Then somehow his nerve went and he didn’t
know how to begin. “So,” he said again. She pulled out a cork-tipped
cigarette and he hastened to find his lighter and light it for her.
“So when’d you first fly?” he asked at last.
5
Summer 1936. Swimming was over for the afternoon and the girls
were sitting on the dock or out on the slimy wooden float, looking
down into the gray-green water or over toward the prickle of pines
across the lake or at each other. Their wool suits of black, or navy
edged with white, drying in the late sun: still damp tomorrow when the
girls would have to squirm back into them for morning swim.
It came as a noise first, from where they couldn’t tell because the
bowl of the lake bounced sound from rim to rim unplaceably: new girls
were known to wake up crying out in the night when the Delaware &