which even those who hadn’t gone to see Lon Chaney tormented in the
movie (Prosper hadn’t) knew to be a killing taunt. Never mind: if he
110 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
stayed near her he wouldn’t be kicked or pelted with dingbats—those
who liked the idea of doing that were also the ones most afraid of Mary
Wilma, her needle-sharp sense of each of their weaknesses and inade-
quacies; and she didn’t allow group activities she hadn’t conceived of.
Her family had a house a few blocks from Prosper’s, a whole house
that they rented part of to others but whose basement and attic and
weedy garden and shed were all theirs, a huge domain, and she brought
Prosper there and took him all through it. She revealed its arcana to
him only slowly, watching his reaction to certain mysterious or alarm-
ing items as though he might not rise to the occasion, as though others
before him perhaps had not: in the basement ancient pickled things in
jars of murky fluid, which she claimed were babies but surely were only
pig’s feet or tongues; in the shed a black metal hook that she said had
once served her grandfather as a hand, its brutal rusted tip still sharp—
what had the old man done with it, to whom? She menaced Prosper
with it, and he didn’t flinch, though he wouldn’t touch it himself.
Anyway maybe it wasn’t what she said it was, because she was a big
liar, as Prosper told her, as everybody told her; she didn’t seem to
mind.
“Go on,” she said, pushing him from behind. They went up the
halls to the top of the house, where a rope hung that pulled down a
flight of stairs leading to the attic. “You probably never saw this
before,” she said as the staircase descended gently, treads rotating into
place. He shrugged nonchalantly, but he hadn’t. Mary Wilma had just
had her black hair bobbed, and Prosper couldn’t stop looking at the
tendons of her neck and the hollow between, like a boy’s now but not
like a boy’s. “Up we go, little Prosper,” she said. “Up up up.” When
they had gone up through the hole in the ceiling Mary Wilma pulled
up the stair behind them. It seemed to take no effort at all; Prosper
wondered why not.
There were other mysteries to be revealed in the dry dim warmth. A
harmonium whose cracked and mouse-chewed bellows could only
wheeze spooky groans like a consumptive or the ghost of one. A dress
dummy she hugged, calling out Ma, Ma. The dust on these things and
in the air, the slatted windows always open, the squeak of the gray
boards underfoot, which were so obviously the ceiling of the rooms
below.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 111
She had them play cards there on the floor with a wrinkled and dog-
eared deck. Go Fish. Slapjack. Then she taught him another one, a
good one she said, a better one. It was called Lightning. She laid out a
row of cards for herself and one for him, in complicated fashion making
piles and moving cards from one to the other.
“Now you take the bottom card of the first pile and put it on top of
the pile in the middle. No in the middle. No across-ways. That’s the
Boodle. You leave that there strictly alone. Now hold out your cards.”
She bent forward to transfer cards from his hand to hers and hers to
his. Some were laid down.
“Prosper! Not there! I told you!”
“You said before—”
“Now we have to start all over. Put down eight piles of three
cards . . .”
“It was seven before.”
She reached to grab his shirt, disordering the cards that were spread
in arcane ways over the floor between them. “You listen! Eight piles of
three!”
“You said before—”
“Do it!” she said.
He threw down his cards. “You’re just making it up. There isn’t any
game at all, just rules.”
She was laughing. “It’s fun! It’s a good game. You must do it.”
Her face was very close to his. “Stop being mean, Mary Wilma,” he
stick?”
She almost fell into him laughing, her laughter seeming to say that
he’d found out her secret or maybe that he was the funniest person in
the world, fixing him at the same time with her wide unbreakable gaze.
“Prosper!” she cried, as though he were a block away. “The mean
stick?”
“Yes!” he said, unable not to laugh too, and then she had grabbed
him again by the shirt.
“Prosper!” She’d stopped laughing, her fierce hilarity remaining
though. “Let’s take your pants off!”
He didn’t look away. “Let’s take yours off.”
She instantly did, reaching up under her dress and pulling down.
112 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
She lifted both bare legs in the air and slipped over her shoes the little
white bundle. Just as he did it himself every night. “Now you,” she
said.
Everybody grows up by leaps, and not by a steady climb like a
mountaineer’s. As though he had just been pulled up by the hair to
look over an enclosing ridge, Prosper hung in a space of Mary Wilma’s
creating, unable then to confute or even really to perceive what she had
done: she had taken off her pants but given nothing away, yet she had
certainly gone first, leaving him to go next, fair’s fair. All that Mary
Wilma was, and did, and would be; all that he was and knew, all now
altered. He started unbuttoning.
Afterward he always said, when he would ask her (or she would say,
inviting him), Let’s go play Lightning: and a few times up in the attic
they did lay out cards in Mary Wilma’s meaningless arrangements. But
these nongames became briefer and then were forgotten even though
the name remained as the name for what they did do. Mary Wilma,
after she had played that first trick on Prosper, was as willing as he was
to reveal, whipping off her jumper with practiced celerity as Prosper
stood before her, new flesh extruding strangely but interestingly from
him. “Now what’s this, ” she would cry, her hand shooting like a bird’s
claw to snatch it, gripping as though it might fly away. “What’s this
supposed to be! Huh, Prosper? What?”
As often though she liked to play a pretend game, as though naked-
ness relieved her of the heavy responsibilities of leadership and returned
her to an earlier time in her life when the world could all be invented.
She became or played a vague helpless party, moving as though under
water or in a dream, her act for Prosper. “Oh gee”—absent, distrait—
“oh look I have forgot my pants, oh dear. Here I am outside and no
cloath-es, what will I do. Oh my oh dear they all see me, oh they see
my posterior, oh boy, my buttawks, ooh what will I do. I will sit here
and wait for the trolley.” Her head lolled, she parted her legs where she
sat on an old trunk. “Oh dear now I must pee pee, now what, oh well
oh well I guess I just will, dum de dum de dum, can’t help it, ooh
oops.” The first time the game reached this point she just
pretended,
making a sissing noise as her hands feebly grasped air, and the second
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 113
time too; but the third time, she lifted her dusty knees and regarded
Prosper with a face that mixed a hot triumphant Mary Wilma chal-
lenge into the fey person she was pretending to be; then she let go,
water spraying from the cleft in the girl way, not like his own straight
stream, wetting the box and the gray floor. His face and breast hot
with amazement and elation.
What they did in the attic (that word attic ever after retaining a
shadow of secret warm shared exposure for him) didn’t change Mary
Wilma’s ways out in the world with the others, and only later on did it
occur to him what a chance she’d taken with him, how brave she’d
been, those things they did together were riskier for her than any crazy
brave thing she’d ever done, than climbing up to the railroad bridge
from the river, than letting Hoopie Morris shoot her in her winter-
coated back with his air rifle to prove it wasn’t fatal like Hoopie stu-
pidly claimed: because Prosper could have told on her. He could, as she
certainly knew; as she would certainly have told on someone if she
needed to, to maintain her place. You know what Mary Wilma does?
Yelled someday when she bossed him or mocked him, as she never
stopped doing. You know what Mary Wilma does? And she would
instantly have been toppled as leaders in the news were; her power
would have vanished. Tears of rage, he could almost see it. Why would
she take that chance?
Because (Vi Harbison told Prosper in Henryville, having heard a
brief version of this, the first anecdote or instance Prosper offered,
though not one that in Vi’s opinion counted) because she trusted Pros-
per not to.
But why did she think she could trust him, Prosper wanted to know;
and if Vi knew, or had an idea, she didn’t say.
It didn’t go on long, but it didn’t end because one or both of them
decided to quit, or chickened out, not at all, but only because (as nearly
as Prosper could figure it later) it was just at that time that he was dis-
covered by the Odd Fellows, and went away to the hospital, and all
that happened thereafter began to happen, one thing falling into the
next and the next, until at last he wasn’t even living in the same neigh-
borhood, and—though this he never knew—neither was she. What
became of them all, she and Hoopie and Wally and the others whose
names he couldn’t recall, those he had once spent all day with, in school
114 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
or after, on Saturdays and Sundays? He rarely thought about them
afterward, but they certainly were a Passionate Series as Pancho Notz-
ing would later describe it to him—lovers of power and lovers of plea-
sure, the greedy and the indifferent, the retiring and the unhesitating,
an entire spectrum of human temperaments, needs, and wants, enough
anyway to make a complete society, the only one he’d ever know him-
self to be a member of until he came to live and work among the Teenie
Weenies still far away then in time and space.
2
That orthopedic hospital, though a source of civic pride pictured
on postcards that visitors to town could buy, was not used as
much as the founders and supporters had expected: not enough
people willing to go have the clubfoot or the gimp leg they’d
lived with for years corrected, or with enough money to pay for it. So
the local chapter of the International Order of Odd Fellows (whose
building, with its name at once comical and sinister, had hung over the
wasteland where Prosper’s gang had played ball) volunteered to survey
the county and learn who was in need, who could be helped, especially
among the children; and to raise the money to pay for the surgeries of
some. It was Mrs. Vinograd who brought Prosper to their attention,
Prosper and one or two others she had observed as well. Despite her
belief that Poor Posture could be overcome by will and self-control,
Mrs. Vinograd also believed in doctors and the advance of Medicine;
she believed in efficiency, in principle and in practice. She didn’t tell
Prosper or his mother what she had done, though, and when the two
moon-faced men in great double-breasted suits appeared at the Olan-
ders’ door and announced who they were and their interest in Prosper,
he assumed that they had come to claim him as one of their own: an
Odd Fellow, as they were; the lodge he was a member of.
When it became clearer what the two wide smilers actually meant
116 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
by coming there, Prosper’s mother lifted four fingers to her chin in
doubt or fear. “Oh dear,” she said.
“Get you some help, you see,” said one, gently, knowing to whom
he spoke.
“Well he’s been fine this far,” she said.
“But he could be fixed right up,” said the other Odd Fellow, and
tousled Prosper’s hair as though he were six, or a dog.
“Oh but an operation,” Prosper’s mother said. “An operation?”
“At no cost to you now or ever,” said the first, a salesman.
“But what about his schooling? That’s important too.”
“We’re just here to make sure the boy gets examined, ma’am.” He
drew out from within his capacious jacket a memorandum book and a
gold pen; and they all turned to Prosper.
Examined. To see, first, if it really was possible to fix him right up.
On a sloppy winter day Prosper and his mother took the streetcar to
the hospital, which stood on a rise above a raw new neighborhood on
the other side of the city. They had to cross a construction site on duck-
boards, then climb up a path and two flights of stairs to reach the
doors. There they made themselves known at the window, waited on a
bench in the echoey strange-smelling waiting room where hortatory
posters had been put up. His mother lifted her eyes to one after another,
patted her bosom, moaned almost inaudibly. One showed a funny man
about to sneeze, finger beneath his nose, and warned that coughing,
sneezing, spitting spread influenza! Another showed a family
man, his wife and child cowering behind him, desperately trying to
keep shut a door on the outer darkness where a vague white hideous
specter was trying to come in. Tuberculosis. Shutting the door on the
thing looked hopeless, though it wasn’t probably supposed to.
After a long time a nurse all in white, even to her shoes, called their
name and led them down wide high corridors across floors more highly
polished than any Prosper had ever seen, gleaming tile seeming to
vanish beneath his muddy feet as though he walked on water. Doors
opened on either side and he glimpsed people being ministered to, lift-
ing legs or arms with nurses’ help or playing slow games with big balls.
They were shown into a room to wait with other young people, other
culls of the Odd Fellows he supposed, some of them glad to see people
in their own case and lifting hands in salute or recognition, some who
F O U R F R
E E D O M S / 117
wouldn’t meet his eyes. One a delicate pale girl with white-blond hair
carefully marcelled, her spine so out of true it seemed she had been cut
in two across the middle and the two parts put back together incor-
rectly. She shrank farther away as Prosper helplessly stared, as though
she could feel the gaze she couldn’t meet, and his mother at last pulled
his hand to make him stop.
The young doctor he was finally taken to see—hawk-faced, his hair
laid tight against his head with Wildroot oil, its odor unmistakable,
the same that Prosper’s father had used—made one judgment right
away. Prosper was to stop using the Boston girdle: it could do him no
good, the doctor said. He took it from Prosper and with thumb and
finger held it up, fouled with sweat and other things, edge-worn and
splitting, as though it were some vermin he had shot. Prosper’s heart
lifted.
Then he was taken, more wonderful still, to have an X-ray, the
nurse telling him it wouldn’t hurt and would show what the inside of
his body and his bones looked like, but Prosper knew all that, and
stepped up bared to the waist smartly and efficiently, put his breast and
then each side and his back against the glass as the doctor showed him;
it didn’t hurt, though he was sure he felt pass through him coldly the
rays without a name. Then that was all. Back through the waiting
room, still unable to make the pale girl see him, along the corridors
and through the doors and down the steps and home. Three weeks
later a letter came from the hospital saying that he was being consid-
ered as a candidate for surgical correction of spinal lordosis, and set-
ting another date for more examinations.
Prosper couldn’t know it, but even that first uneventful journey into
the hospital had nearly undone his mother. He did know that she was
someone to whom you couldn’t bring your bleeding body parts to be
bandaged, as she would faint, or say she was about to, and turn away
white-faced and trembling; also best not to tell her you’d thrown up, or
had sat on the pot with the gripes until a load of hot gravy was passed
that flecked the bowl and lid. These things were for you to know. Long
afterward, in one of those reassessments that come upon us unwilled,
like a sudden shift of perspective in a movie scene that shows the lurk-