lenging voice Prosper would not have thought she had, that stilled the
tall-shoe clumpers and spastics and cripples:
“July can’t Walk Walk Walk
July can’t Talk Talk Talk
July can’t Eat Eat Eat
With a knife and Fawk Fawk Fawk.”
In all that time Prosper turned ten and then eleven. He passed from
fifth grade into sixth, or would have if he’d gone to school; the teachers
who volunteered on the ward never tried too hard to find out who
needed to learn what and who already knew it well enough—Amerigo
Vespucci, i before e except after c, 160 square rods to the acre. He grew two inches taller, though from now on he would grow taller more
slowly. The stock market crash took all of the family money Nurse
Muscle Eenie’d put into the Blue Ridge Corporation. Some of the sick-
est boys vanished from the ward, usually at night, and no notice was
taken of their absence, not by the nurses, not by the patients; they
weren’t spoken of again. Charlie went home, a little less knotted up
than before. Let’s go, son, his father said, grappling him and lifting
him down from the bed. Prudence went home, in the same white dress
and bow she’d worn to have her picture taken long ago; straighter now
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 133
but not all straighter, seeming to handle herself delicately, a tall stack
of wobbly saucers that might slump and fall. She smiled for him,
though, and showed him that she was taking all the versions of her
name he had made home with her. She seemed happier, he thought. He
never saw her again.
At the end of the year, his uncles appeared again, without the
chocolates this time, but with something to impart that they seemed
to have been ordered to tell him but couldn’t. Each in turn glanced
now and then behind himself, as though the unspoken thing were
right behind them, nudging. In the end they only asked several times
how he was doing, made a joke or two, and hurried away, saying
they’d be back. It was Aunt Bea and Aunt May who, a day after and
in the wake of his uncles’ failure, had to come to tell him that while
he had been in the hospital all this time, his mother had lost ground;
had worsened; weakened—they took turns supplying words—and
failed. She had died just about the time (Prosper later figured out)
he’d first put on his braces.
Whatever else Prosper would remember of that day, the thing that
would cause his own heart to fill with some kind of fearsome rain
when it occurred to him, the thing that for him would always stand for
human grief unbearable and rich, were the tears that stood in his aunts’
eyes as they talked to him then, the tremble in their voices. He had
never seen grown-ups in the grip of sorrow, and though they came
close and put each a hand on him he couldn’t conceive of it as being on
his behalf; it was their own, and he would have given anything to have
been able to say to them It’s all right, don’t cry.
“My God,” Vi Harbison said to Prosper in Henryville, or to the world and
the air around.
“What,” said Prosper.
“You went in with the bent back and came out and you couldn’t
walk?”
“I can walk,” Prosper said.
“You know what I mean. And then just while you were getting
better they told you your mother died?”
“They didn’t want to tell me till I was getting out. So I’d have some
134 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
relatives, you know, around. They thought it would be tough if I had to
learn it and then be in the hospital alone.”
“What did she die of?”
“I don’t know. No one said.”
“My God.” Vi’s own mother had passed with her sons and daughter
around her, her last labored breath; they’d seen her put into her box
and into the earth and the dirt covering her. She knew. “And by this
time your father was gone who knew where?”
“Yes.”
“My God. You were alone. I can’t imagine.”
uncles too.”
“Aunts and uncles aren’t parents. I mean they can try to do their
best, but.”
“Well. I don’t know. It was different.”
“Well it can’t have been better.”
“You didn’t know my mother and father,” Prosper said. “You didn’t
know Bea and May.”
4
It will be different when you come out, they all said—Mert and Fred,
Bea and May, with different faces at the different times when they
said it—and he had pondered that as best he could, but it wasn’t easy
to think through what that meant, different; when he looked for-
ward he saw a world that was all changed but actually all the same,
because he couldn’t imagine it changed. Once he dreamed of it, all dif-
ferent, but what was different about it was what was gone: his city, the
streets, his house and the vacant lots around it and the buildings that
had looked down on it. What was in their place he couldn’t see.
It was that way, all changed and the same. Mert and Fred came to
get him. He could walk out and down the hall and out the door on his
own, and all the nurses, even Nurse Muscle Eenie, came out of the
wards and offices to say good-bye and watch him go: first using the
respectable Four Point, then the faster Swing Gait, an uncle on each
side of him, one carrying the bag with his things, their hands at the
ready and making for him nervously now and then as though he were
an unsteady and valuable piece of furniture they were moving. “Doing
fine, son,” said a doctor who passed them. He was doing fine.
The long stairway to the street where Fred had double-parked the
car was a different matter. Prosper halted at the top, looking down like
a mountaineer about to rappel. Then Mert picked him up without a
136 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
word, and as though stealing him he took the steps at a good pace,
Fred after him. Prosper, pressed against his uncle, could smell Mert’s
seersucker and even his cigar case; Mert’s breath whinnied faintly up
his throat.
They tried to hustle him into the car by main strength, but his rigid
legs posed a packing problem that they argued silently over until Pros-
per made them stop. They stood back and watched as he unclipped the
locks at the knees of his braces and let them down and tucked his legs
into the car.
“Easy as pie,” said Fred.
“Shut up, start the car,” said Mert. A couple of passers-by had stopped
on the street to gawk at the operation, which Mert wanted to get over
with. “Rubes,” he said. Fred got the car going. Prosper in the back seat
laid his head against the leather humps of the upholstery and watched the
city go past, not the familiar streetcar route but another way, chosen—
though Prosper couldn’t know it—to bypass his old house.
“Take Main,” said Mert.
“Main?”
“Main. Take Main and turn on Pearl.”
“Why Pearl?”
“Just
do it,” Mert said.
The world was rich and huge. That’s what was different. It poured
in on him as though it had just come into being, or was coming into
being as the car drove through it: huge sky, air full of odors, streets full
of newborn people in new-made coats and hats, ding of a bicycle bell
like struck crystal. Even the parts of the journey he recognized, streets
and corners and buildings, come upon sideways or at the wrong end,
seemed newer, sharper, bigger.
Then they pulled up before a house he knew, though not, at first,
what house it was. Fred set the brake but let the motor run, and Mert
leapt out and came to get Prosper; manhandled him out of the car as he
had into it, and set him up like a department-store dummy on the side-
walk before the house, which had by now become the house where Bea
and May lived, a house Prosper couldn’t help thinking used to be some-
where else.
Fred had got out of the car now and come to stand by Prosper. Mert
brushed his hair with a hand, and Fred set down his bag of things
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 137
beside him and stuffed a five-dollar bill in his shirt pocket. Then the
two of them looked at each other, came to a silent agreement, and with
a quick good-bye, good-bye they climbed hastily back into the impa-
tiently muttering auto and went off. As in an old comedy, the door
before Prosper opened at the same moment as the car behind him
pulled away. His two aunts appeared.
“Prosper!” Bea said, as though amazed, delighted too.
“They’re gone,” said May.
He had been turned over by the two uncles to the two aunts, who
came out to claim him, one gentle hand each on his shoulders, faces
with calming smiles bent to look into his.
“Hello, Aunt May. Hello, Aunt Bea.”
“Why hello, Prosper. We’re glad you’re here.”
“May,” said Bea, “how’s he going to get into the house?”
There were two low steps up to the narrow porch and another into
the house. If he’d been asked before this day if his aunts’ front door had
steps up to it, and how many, he wouldn’t have been able to say. There
was a little bannister for the porch steps, made of coupled plumber’s
pipes, like those of the practice stairs where Prosper spent many hours.
He stepped out from the shelter of their hands, swapped his right crutch
into his left hand, grasped the bannister, and with it and the left crutch
hoisted himself so that his feet landed on the first step. He steadied
himself, feeling his aunts’ and the street’s and the world’s eyes on him,
marveling or doubtful. He did it again. Then again, but this time the
toes of his shoes caught under the lip of the step. He fell back to start
over with a bigger stronger push, swinging his feet back and then over
the lip to land on the porch. A large cat that had just put its head out
the open door turned and fled from the sight of him. Prosper turned to
face his aunts, who looked at each other and then at him in wonder-
ment. How do you like that. Easy as pie.
Flushed with success, he lifted himself over the threshold and stood
in the hall. There was a smell of fusty rug, baked bread, the cat, a
potent odor he didn’t know was incense, Bea’s Fatima cigarettes,
window box geraniums. Sun came in through the open lace-curtained
windows of the parlor beyond, falling on a dark velvet hassock and its
armchair. Far door into a yellow kitchen. Later on, when a sudden
memory of his standing that morning in the hall of Bea and May’s
138 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
house would arise in him, Prosper would sometimes feel his breast fill
with a sob, though it hadn’t done so then; and he never could say just
what was gathered so densely into that moment as to cause it. Escape;
refuge; exile too. Relief he couldn’t have accounted for, and grief he
was not yet even able to measure. His aunts’ true kindness, and every-
thing that kindness couldn’t assuage. Pride that he had come into their
house under his own power. New world. Lost life and strength. Maybe
more than anything it was his memory of that boy’s ignorance, igno-
rance of the years he would live in the rooms he could see from where
he stood, and of all that would befall him there: that boon ignorance.
Bea and May had lived together all of Prosper’s life. Prosper had never
had much sense of how old they were; he guessed that May was younger
than Bea, but he was wrong about that. They were the age of his par-
ents, but in their knockabout freedom they seemed younger, in their
fearlessness in the world they seemed older. Bea was dizzier, but May
had done crazier things in her life—Prosper would hear her say this
was so, but he was left to imagine what the crazy things might have
been. She seemed to have come to rest in Bea, and was not tempted
now, though Prosper would have liked to see an outburst or breakout
of some kind, to know what May might be capable of.
Bea sold cosmetics at a department store downtown, spraying
women with little spurts of My Sin or L’Heure Bleue and talking to
them about their coloration. She had a wide-eyed soft-spoken cheer
that seemed like total honesty, and she was honest, believed that she
could suit a woman to a product that would benefit her, and took a
dollar for a jar of lettuce oil or patent vanishing cream with a feeling of
having done a good deed all around. May worked as office manager in
a firm that sold business supplies and furniture wholesale, leather-
topped desks and swivel chairs and gooseneck lamps and filing cabi-
nets, as well as typewriters, time clocks, and adding machines. She
never regarded her job as her calling, as Bea did hers. She complained
about the time it took from her real life, which was lived in the realm
of the spirit: her delicate, years-long negotiation with a disembodied
child who communicated with May by various means. The child—
whose name was Fenix Vigaron—taught May a lot, but also lied to her
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 139
atrociously, apparently just for the fun of it, and had another friend
among the living somewhere in Servia or Montenegro, a friend who
got different help, maybe better help (the child hinted with casual cru-
elty) than she was willing to give to May. No one in her office knew
about May’s other life; but there, with her journal and ledger and her
in-box and out-box, no matter how fast she moved May seemed to
herself to be standing still, whereas sitting in stillness awaiting the
dead child’s touch she seemed always to be moving, however slowly,
toward something.
Bea was always glad to get whatever advice Fenix Vigaron had for
her, but May was shy about revealing her experiences to others; too
many of them believed in things that May didn’t believe in for her to
talk to them about Fenix. They would go on about how their mothers
and lovers and babies had called out to them as they sat holding hands
in darkened rooms with paid mediums, but—May wanted to know—
how could the only dead souls who
mattered to you be just the ones
your medium’s spirit guide could introduce you to? Wouldn’t it be more
likely that they wouldn’t be acquainted with them, among so many, the
Great Majority? It was like running into someone who hails from a
distant city where you yourself know one person, and asking, Say do
you know Joe Blow, he’s from there—and of course he doesn’t. May’s
little angel or devil couldn’t give May news of her brother, Prosper’s
father; she couldn’t say if he was actually among them over there now
(as May believed), and didn’t seem to care either; nor did she ever come
to know Prosper’s mother, so as to bring any comforting words from
her. May told Prosper anyway: your mother’s happy now; nothing can
hurt her now; I know it’s so. Prosper nodded, solemn, as it seemed he
should do. Prosper knew nothing then about Fenix Vigaron, though
Fenix knew all about him.
The two women had taken on the orphaned Prosper (they’d agreed
to regard him as an orphan, though Bea had her doubts) because they
could, and because there was no one else not already consumed with
their own children, or with the care of some other displaced or incom-
petent relative, or who wasn’t just unsuitable, like Mert and Fred, into
whose families (if they could be called that) you wouldn’t want to insert
any growing innocent.
But how to meet his needs, practical and spiritual, a male child,
140 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
they themselves not so young and flexible as once they were? He’d have
to have a room of his own, and (it took a while for them to grasp this)
not at the top of the stairs, where theirs and a little spare room were.
The only choice was the downstairs room the women called the parlor,
though it was small and dim and they rarely used it, preferring the big
bright room that ought to have been for dining. Thank goodness the
bathroom was downstairs.
So they sent Mert and Fred a note telling them that their next task
was to empty this room of its horsehair sofa and mirrored sideboard
and grandfather clock and glass-shaded lamps and store them safely
somewhere, then bring in instead a boy-size bed, a dresser and a ward-
robe where he could put away his clothes and his, well, his things,
snips and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails. A desk May provided from
work, and a steel lamp to put on it. (This oaken thing, with a hidden