to be put up on the telephone poles around the neighborhood, and the
little ad they placed after much thought in the evening paper—“Bring
out your BEST and do it for LESS.” He made their sign too—an old
cupboard door lovingly enameled and varnished.
“May, look at this! This boy’s a genius! So artistic!”
The Mayflower was the name they had chosen, arching over a some-
what emblematic flower and its visiting bee, a notion of Fenix Vigaron’s.
Beauty Salon with a dot between each letter and the next, elongating
the phrase elegantly, and an arrow pointing down to the door in the
alley, opened now and painted.
“Our shingle,” May said and laughed. They hung it up on the house
corner, and toasted it and themselves with a ruby glass of schnapps.
The shop began to do business, but only after a month or so of wait-
ing, Bea and May dressed and ready every morning like hosts in that
anxious hour when it seems no guests at all will show up. There were a
couple of early mistakes, money refunded, free services offered in com-
pensation and indignantly refused—Bea and May in the withering gaze
of an enraged matron, Bea offering soothe and May ready to give the
old bat an earful but smiling on. Bea’s skills and generous approbation
brought women back and back, and others were drawn in by May’s
hints of her connections beyond this plane of existence (she tried hard
not to make too much of this, but the stories she heard as women soaked
their nails in soapy water or sat beneath the penitential dryer were too
intriguing not to report to her spirit guide; May delivered Fenix’s gnomic
responses to the women but refused to explicate them, which only made
May seem the more privy to secret wisdom). Things got pretty busy.
“Prosper,” Bea said to him as she cleaned the shop at day’s end.
“Yes.” He looked up from the old copy of The Sunny Side he was
reading. The Sunny Side was the official publication of the American
Optimists Association. Bea took the magazine, read it faithfully, and
they piled old copies here for clients. Bea was an Optimist.
“We’re thinking,” Bea said, “that you can be more help in the
shop.”
“Sure,” Prosper said. He closed the picture-less little magazine. The
motto of the AOA, printed beneath the title, was Every day, in every
way, I’m getting better and better. Émile Coué.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 163
“There’s things you can’t do,” Bea said, standing tiptoe to lower
and lock the transom. “But also things you can.”
“Sure,” said Prosper. He straightened up, ready for his orders. What
could he do? Well, he could answer the phone and keep the appoint-
ments book, he could greet the customers as they arrived, keep things
orderly, just anything. Maybe—who knew—he could learn a bit of the
business, washing hair or similar. Lots of men did such work, the best
paid were men in fact, she could tell him.
“But now I have to tell you,” Bea said, tidying and fussing with her
back to him for so long that Prosper understood it was easier to say her
piece without facing him. “You’ll have to look nice. A nice clean shirt
and a tie. You’ll have to shave, you know, every day, and maybe a little
talcum. Tooth powder. I know the bath’s not easy for you, but.” Now
at last she did turn to him, beaming. “We’ll be so proud to have you!
Really!”
He could only beam back. He was possessed by the ticklish feeling of
having been seen, of understanding that he could be seen by others, who
passed certain judgments or came to certain opinions about him because
they saw not the inside of himself that he saw but the outside, where the
face he couldn’t see and the smells of himself and the smuts and the
wrinkles on him (that he inside could always account for or discount)
came first, first and foremost. He remembered his father at the nightly
labor of polishing his narrow shoes, instructing Prosper that one day
he’d know how important it was, and why. Bring out your best.
“All right,” he said.
From that day forward he did take an interest in himself, studying
the image in the mirror, not only the plastered hair and knotted tie (the
four-in-hand) but also the odd attraction in his own green eyes, a ques-
tion with no answer passing back and forth from him to it. Every day,
in every way, I’m getting better and better, he’d say softly. Bea was
astonished at the change, his going from indifference to punctilious
attention, but it was only that he hadn’t known, no one had explained
to him you could take yourself in hand this way, as though you were a
pot to be polished or a garden to be weeded.
He delighted in the shop, the women who came and went; he greeted
each by name and made some remark pertinent to her, asked about her
164 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
poodle or her daughter in business school or her ailing husband. They
lost one or two customers repelled by Prosper’s clattering around the
shop still painfully bent, but he won the loyalty of others. His lacks
and inabilities made them want to mother him, no surprise really, espe-
cially when they learned he had no real mother, was actually an
Orphan: but the same lacks and inabilities somehow allowed them to
be themselves in his presence, as they were in the shop with May and
Bea but weren’t with other men (he saw how they could change when,
as now and then happened, a husband poked his head into the shop to
pick one of them up—they’d switch in a moment to a guarded, prac-
ticed manner, even if it was a seemingly childish or dizzy one. And
only he knew). He listened to their stories just as Bea and May did, and
listened to the wisdom his aunts dispensed. He saw tears, more than
once; overheard a shocking cynicism too. He gets nothing from me in
that bed but once a month. And he’d better make it worth my while,
I’m telling you.
He supplemented what he learned with his reading, after May began
stocking old copies of True Story magazine she got from a younger
cousin. When the shop was quiet and his tasks done, Prosper sat by the
extension phone and read them. I Married a Dictator. Aren’t there
limits to what a woman will stand, even for such a mad infatuation as
hers? The big pulp pages were a cyclopedia of female life, from which
he learned of the whelming strength of women’s fears and desires, the
immensity of their sacrifices, the crimes they were capable of. They ran
away from tyrannical preacher fathers, abased themselves in dime-a-
dance halls and speakeasies, took awful vengeance on betraying lovers
or pertinacious rivals, and always despite repression and abuse their
honest need and goodness shone through. They went out on their own
when Father died and the pension stopped, they worked hard amid dan-
gers and pestering men, they fell for one night of passion with a man
who seemed so clean and kind, only to find he’s fronting for a sex
&n
bsp; exchange club! They escaped, they hid out, they made their own way,
they met a man not like other men, they found love or at least wisdom.
Sadder but wiser, or happy at last. He learned a lot from the ads too,
about the clever counterfeits of underwear and makeup, and also the
unnameable ills and pains that perhaps his mother had suffered, that
any woman might and men never did. For those special women’s
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 165
hygiene needs—be SURE with ZONITOR, whatever that was, the
woman’s lined brow and worried eyes erased and smooth again.
The men in the stories were good but simple, or they were ignoble
clods, or if they were smart they were only smart about cheating and
lying; unlike the women they had desires and schemes and pride and
even sturdy sense but no insides. No wonder the women lost them or
lost faith in them or settled for them when they knew in their hearts it
was wrong. If she confided EVERYTHING in him, would he still love
her? How could she be sure? It seemed that the way to win the esteem
of women was to become as like one as he could: as trusting, as unsoiled
deep down, as wholehearted.
“Ha,” Vi said to Prosper in Henryville. “I don’t know how you
could think that way about women. You were around them so much.
Anybody who’s around them that much’d have to find out pretty soon
they’re no better than men in most ways, and some ways worse.”
“I don’t know,” Prosper said. “I just preferred them.”
Vi shook her head over him. “It was those nice old Lizzies you lived
with,” she said. “You got the wrong idea.”
“That’s what my uncles thought,” Prosper said.
“Prosper,” said May to him one evening when the shop had closed, “it
seems to me your hair’s getting a little shaggy. Maybe it’s time to give
you a trim.”
“Really?” said Prosper.
When he was a boy Bea and May had gone with him once to the
barbershop down on the avenue, and at the door had sent him inside
with two bits in his hand, but the vast glossy chairs and the row of
white-coated unwelcoming men had defeated him—he’d have to ask
for help to get into a chair, and then to get down again, and the barbers
seemed unlikely to offer that help, though since he didn’t dare to ask,
he’d never know: anyway he turned around and came back out again,
and went home with Bea and May, and they’d made do thereafter with
scissors.
Now, though, they had a little more expertise.
“Maybe,” Bea said, teasing, her hand pushing Prosper’s hair this
way and that, as though he were any client, “maybe you need a little
166 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
something. You’re a good-looking fellow, you know. You could look
better.”
Prosper laughed, embarrassed and alert, pleased too.
“Sure,” May said. “Why not. Just a little soft wave. You know, like
Rudy Vallee. Or who’s that English fellow, Leslie Howard.” With a
motion of her hand she indicated that nice shy way his blond curls fell
over his forehead, the way he pushed them back and they fell again.
“Sure. Bea, fire up the dryer.”
They wrapped a towel around him, laid his head back in the basin,
and when the water was warm May washed his hair, delightful submis-
sion-inducing sensation of her strong fingers in his scalp. The two
women argued over which of them would do the cut and wave, and
finally took turns, each criticizing the other’s work and laughing at
Prosper’s fatuous and ceaseless grin. They had him all pinned and ready
to be put under the great bonnet of the dryer when there was a loud rap
at the door, more like the cops than any belated client; they all started.
Parting the little curtain that hung over the window of the door,
May murmured “Oh my stars,” and opened the door. Mert came in,
more as though exiting a familiar house and stepping into a cold and
dangerous street than the reverse. “Hi, May, hi, I,” he said, and
stopped, catching sight of Prosper. Fred, coming in behind him, looked
in over his shoulder.
“Hi, Uncle Mert,” Prosper said.
“Jeez, May, what the hell,” Mert said.
“Now, Mert,” Bea said.
“What are you doing to this boy?”
“We’re making him look nice. Anybody can look nice.”
“Almost anybody,” May said coldly, narrowing her eyes at Mert.
“Man oh man,” said grinning Fred. “Will you get a load of this.”
“Shut up,” Mert said without ceasing to study Prosper. “This is just
what I was afraid of. You two trying to raise a man.”
“You button your lip,” May said. She crossed her arms before her.
“As if you could have done it.”
“Well just look at him,” Mert said. “Jeez.” He came closer to where
Prosper sat unmoving, still grinning like Joe E. Brown but now from a
different impulse. “Just because he’s a cripple he don’t have to be a
sissy.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 167
“And where’ve you been the last seven years?” May said. Her foot
was tapping the floor, her arms still crossed.
“Well starting now,” Mert said. “He just needs a chance.”
“Well then,” Bea said gently, “you might start by saying hello.”
And Prosper saw his uncle’s face suffused with a dramatic blush that
rose from thick neck to forehead, the first adult he’d ever seen so taken,
which was a thing of great interest; and then he put a big hand out to
Prosper, who had to fumble his own right hand from under the towel
to take it.
“Anyway we ought to finish up,” Bea said. “Before those pins come
loose.”
The icehouse, where the disreputables that Bea and May had refused to
describe to Prosper gathered, was over on the West Side, past the rail-
road tracks and in fact in another township, which made an important
legal difference, even though no one much remembered the fact or even
the name of that vanished village. It was close enough to what had
once upon a time been a lake in the woods that ice could be cut and
sledded there easily. Now the ice was made on the spot in a long shed
where the big Westinghouse electric engines ran the belts of an ammo-
nia condenser, but it was stored, covered in straw, down in the same
old brick underground, breathing cold breath like a cave’s mouth out
to the office and the street. Since the way down into it had been built
when oxen were used to slide the ice in and out in great blocks, it went
sloping at a shallow angle: Prosper loved to walk down that way into
the cool silence.
The front offices where Mert and Fred ran the ice business, and sold
coal and fuel oil as well when and if they could spare the time from
other enterprises, were a rich habitation—tin ceilings darkened with
cigar smoke, girlie calendars, spiked orders growing yellow with age,
freshly cracked decks of cards, ringing phones Mert talked into two at
a time even while calling for Fred to deal with this or that matter.
Whatever matter it was that Mert and Fred ha
d come to talk to May
and Bea about had gone no further that night; the men went away with
a mission, to take (as Mert said) the boy in hand, and teach him a few
things; and Prosper’s world widened. Later on he’d think that May and
168 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Bea must have felt abandoned by him, and must have resented if not
hated it that he’d taken up with the icehouse gang, and he’d feel shame,
but not then: too much that was new and gratifying came his way, and
more lay just beyond envisioning. He started smoking, not Mert’s
Dutch Masters or Muniemakers but the more fastidious cigarette,
though he found it hard to smoke and walk at the same time, and even-
tually mostly gave it up; he grew a mustache, a thin dark line above his
lip like Ronald Colman’s. The uncles gave him instruction in the arts
of shaking hands and looking a man in the eye, what honor required
you to do and what (they thought) it didn’t, what was owed to friends
and how to look out for Number One at the same time. They made
over his clothes: dressed him not as they themselves dressed, though
they got a tailor to make him a good suit, but as the young blades
nowadays dressed: sport coats of houndstooth or herringbone collared
like shirts rather than lapelled, pastel shirts worn with hand-painted
silk foulards or without a tie, long collar points laid over the jacket.
Trousers richly pleated and draped—Prosper’s braces disappeared
beneath them rather than poking everywhere through the fabric like a
bony beast’s joints. He studied himself in the mirror, considering how
his new pale wide fedora should lie, back like Bing’s or Hoagy’s, or
forward and nearly hiding an eye, mystery man or secret agent, pinch
the front indents to lift it to a lady. Not much could be done with his
shoes, to which the braces were bolted across the instep, but no reason
he couldn’t wear silk socks in argyle patterns or clocked with roses;
Prosper, lifting the knees of his cheviot bags to sit, could glimpse them,
pretty secrets revealed.
They kidded him too about what else they might do for him, take
him out to the suburbs to a certain place, or downtown to one, get his
cherry picked or his ashes hauled, saying it maybe only to laugh at the
face he made—wide-eyed, that grin he was given to that they couldn’t