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    Four Freedoms

    Page 31
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      jawed and laughed, sorted through machine parts idly and knocked off

      for lunch before the horn sounded; far off amid the noise of machinery

      she could hear human rows too. Maybe it was always like this, factory

      work, as full of loose ends and cross-purposes as home, though she

      was surprised to think it was so; in the movies work always proceeded

      through the stages of production purposefully, white molten metal

      poured into rods, rods shaped into this or that, a product taking shape

      as farsighted men gave directions to great machines and the assembly

      line crawled forward. Had she learned better? Or was it just this place?

      Bunce always griped about it, said it was a shambles. She was sorry

      that in her part of the plant she didn’t even see the airplanes taking

      shape; that was in another of the three buildings that were combined

      into the Bull works.

      “It’s crazy,” a woman said to her in the lunchroom, lifting a sand-

      wich to her mouth with hands not quite cleaned of metal dust, in her

      nails and the ridges of her knuckles. “They build the planes here but

      there’s nowhere to fly ’em, you know, test ’em out. So when they’re all

      built they take them apart, put the pieces on a train, and take ’em out

      to a field out there somewheres, and put the pieces together again to fly

      the things.” She chewed, seeming delighted with the craziness of it. “I

      guess they know best.”

      Though the work itself didn’t seem hard, it was continuous, unre-

      lenting, in a way nothing she’d ever done before was; the only thing it

      resembled was the couple of days in the late summer when her dad

      went out to the country and bought bushel baskets of peaches, and she

      F O U R F R E E D O M S / 231

      and her mother and her mother’s and father’s sisters all canned peaches,

      skinning and cutting and scalding the fruit, heating the huge black

      kettles, lowering the pale green Ball jars in their racks into the boiling

      water; then filling the jars, pouring the melted paraffin over each top to

      seal it, over and over, never done, her father carrying the filled jars to

      the basement, climbing up again, weary and persistent. Like that, but

      every day, endlessly, and without the steady accumulation of good

      things to eat in the sweet steam. At evening she made it to the bus and

      walked back up the hill feeling made out of sticks and stones, watching

      her building come into view with a longing so fervent it was as though

      she’d never make it.

      “Was he good?” she asked Mrs. Freundlich, who seemed to watch

      from her window to see Connie approaching and was always there to

      throw open the door before she reached it, displaying Adolph ready

      to go.

      “Well,” Mrs. Freundlich said, looking down at Adolph as though

      trying to make a decision.

      He was dressed and clean, in fact his little cheeks shone like a car-

      toon kid’s, one of the Campbell’s soup kids, and his hair was combed

      and wet on his head. He looked up at his mother with that huge happy

      but questioning look, and—unable to answer it—Connie swept him

      up, and he held tight to her, smelling of something like Florida water

      and his own good smell; and she thanked Mrs. Freundlich briefly and

      took him away, since she’d learned that the woman found it a chore to

      describe what she and Adolph had done all day. It was all right was

      about as explicit as she got. Connie wondered if she even spoke to

      him.

      Holding him on her hip with one arm she fingered a letter from

      Bunce from her mailbox. She glimpsed Mrs. Freundlich, half-hidden

      behind her unclosed door, studying her through the door’s window.

      Honey, Well I have changed jobs again and am working for Van

      Damme Aero in their big plant here. The moneys better and the

      place is swell, all new built, the best of everything. They even

      have a bank right here in the plant! Mostly women work here I

      have to say they don’t know much tho they would learn faster if

      somebody took an interest in them. They are ready for anything.

      232 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

      Say this is the place to be, out west, I doubt I’ll be able to live in

      that smoky old town again. Bye for now, Bunce.

      There was a postal money order for twenty dollars in the envelope.

      The postmark on the envelope said Ponca City, but the letters signify-

      ing the state were smeared and there wasn’t any return address on it.

      You should always put that on, so that letters can find their way back

      to you if they are misdirected. Always.

      She folded the letter back up along the folds he had made and

      thought she would quit her job. She felt certain she’d done something

      to make him not want to come home, and all she could think of was

      that she’d gone out and taken a job and not told him, and it was as

      though her having done that had been somehow communicated to him

      over the spaces between them, between here and the West, maybe in

      the war news they all shared, no matter that it was crazy to think

      that.

      Why hadn’t she pleaded with him to stay, back then when he had

      decided to quit? She saw as though arrayed across the nation those

      smiling willing women of the magazine covers and the newsreels,

      marching to work to stand all day beside a helpful man, rising on tiptoe

      to nail this or screw that, his hot eyes on her, cap lifted in admiration.

      He wasn’t coming back. He was just going to go on farther into the

      war, and when it was over he would be where he was, he’d go on from

      there rather than turning back.

      That night she woke in the deep dark, startled out of sleep by her

      own cry. Something she had dreamed or learned, she couldn’t remem-

      ber what. She thought of that letter from Bunce and all that it had left

      unsaid, the thing that had been going on all along and that she hadn’t

      really known and now she did. She lay entirely still, feeling that she

      was on the point of dissolution, that she would fall to pieces, not just

      as a way of talking but actually: that what made up her would dissoci-

      ate and shrivel away like ash. He would never come back. She knew it,

      it had been what was going to happen from the beginning, like a dealt

      hand of cards. If she could go back now to before he left, she’d hold

      him tight and promise him anything.

      Night went on unrelieved. She was aware of the ticking of the clock,

      warning her with disinterested compassion of the time passing, that

      F O U R F R E E D O M S / 233

      before the light was full she would have to get up to get to work. She

      began a rosary: not wanting to move to get her beads from where they

      hung on the dresser mirror, afraid that if she moved she’d come apart

      somehow, she counted on her fingers. Pray for us sinners now and at

      the hour of our deaths. When the alarm went off at last it woke her,

      though she had no memory of having slept again.

      The day after that was her day off, and she went to visit Bunce’s par-

      ents, as she had promised Bunce she would do, to bring Adolph for

      them to see. She took a city bus to the station and the interu
    rban to the

      neighborhood they lived in, in a square plain house covered in some-

      thing meant to look like bricks. For some reason it was a hard house to

      be glad to go into—stern or forbidding—but once inside it was nice,

      and Bunce’s parents were as warm as little stoves. Like her, Bunce was

      an only child.

      “Oh my gosh, how he’s grown! Dad, come see!”

      Bunce’s father had been a machinist too, but he’d been in an acci-

      dent at work long before, bones crushed in the overturning of a

      mechanical bin, Connie had never been able to picture it exactly,

      though she could a little better now, the Bull plant seemed like it was

      made to cause awful accidents, she saw two or three nearly happen

      every day. He lived on a workmen’s compensation pension and was in

      pain a lot, though rosy-cheeked and always smiling. He grabbed for his

      cane and got up with effort from his chair, though Connie tried to

      keep him there.

      “Well hello, little fella,” he said, tottering above Adolph. “Say you’re

      doing a wonderful job with him, Connie, we’re so proud of you, bear-

      ing up. If there’s anything we can do, we wantcha to let us know.”

      She hadn’t told them she was working, and she’d warned her mother

      not to tell them; her mother had anyway known not to.

      They gathered around the table, and Mom Wrobleski put out a

      cake, which had an epic tale behind it to tell, how it had come to be, as

      every cake did that year—the sugar, the raisins, the eggs. They took

      turns holding Adolph and feeding him cake. Connie had dressed him

      in his little brown suit like a soldier’s with the tie attached—Mom said

      he looked like Herbert Hoover, but Buster said John Bunny. And all

      234 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

      the time the hollow of absence and guilt and fear opened and shrank,

      opened and shrank again inside Connie.

      His parents too had had letters from Bunce, and they brought them

      out to read while the percolator burbled comically. His letters to them

      were more detailed, less jaunty. He described the work he did to his

      father; he complained more expansively to his mother, who shook her

      head in sympathy and made that noise with tongue and teeth that has

      no name. And he gave them, carefully and thoroughly, the addresses

      where they could write back to him. Gosh I miss you old folks at

      home.

      “I had a letter just yesterday,” Connie said. They turned toward

      her, leaned in even, smiling and eager. The cake-matter turned in her

      stomach. “Well he’s doing fine,” she said. The coffeepot burped power-

      fully, not only throwing coffee up into the little glass bulb at the top

      but also lifting the lid to emit a puff of steam; Adolph laughed and

      made the noise too, and they all laughed together. Connie could go on.

      “He’s moved on to a new plant,” she said. “Everything’s wonderful

      there. It’s all new. He just went. They needed people.”

      “I’ll be,” said Mom. “Where did you say?”

      “Ponca City,” Connie said. “Van Damme Aero.”

      Buster clambered from his chair, making noises, going from chair-

      back to chair-back to his own big mauve armchair with the antimacas-

      sars on the arms and back, where he spent most of his day. Beside it

      there was a maple magazine holder, and from it he pulled a big picture

      magazine. “Here,” he said. “For gosh sakes it must be here.”

      They laid it on the table amid them. The cover showed a vast semi-

      circle that you could only tell was a building because workers were

      streaming into it, tiny figures, maybe one of them Bunce. Harsh sun-

      light cast their black shadows on the macadam. building the great

      warbird in indian country, it said.

      Buster flipped through the pages, past the ads for whiskey and

      cleaners and radio tubes and life insurance, every one telling how they

      were helping win the war. “Here it is,” Mom said.

      In the great hangar the wingless bodies were lined up one behind

      the other, each one with its crowd of workers around it. Married

      couples worked on the factory floor together, it said: one couple were

      midgets. In another part of the plant drafting tables went on farther

      F O U R F R E E D O M S / 235

      than you could make them out, men and some women too bent over

      them and the fluorescent strip lighting overhead matching their white

      tables. Women who carried messages through the vast spaces to the

      designers and engineers went on roller skates!

      “ ‘The cafeteria is larger than a city block,’ ” Mom read. “ ‘Seven-

      teen hundred people can be served at a time.’ ” You could see them, six

      lines of workers in their uniforms, trays in hand, passing the steam

      tables. Mom looked again among them for Bunce, but Buster said they

      would have taken these pictures long ago, before the boy got there, use

      your head. The white walls, gleaming as though wet, were all made of

      tile.

      “ ‘Each worker receives a health code number and a card, listing job

      capability and description and any health conditions,’ ” Mom read.

      “ ‘Three clinics serve the plant, and a full hospital is being built in the

      city nearby.’ Imagine.” There was a picture of a large man in a double-

      breasted suit, meeting with a delegation of Indians: Henry Van Damme.

      The health cards were his idea. He’d even thought of having a psy-

      chologist in the clinics. For instance to talk to, if someone lost someone

      in the war.

      “Oh look,” said Mom. A picture showed the nursery: you seemed

      to be looking in through wide high plate-glass windows at a bright

      indoors. In playrooms protected from plant traffic trained nurses cared

      for workers’ children, hundreds of them, Mexican, Indian, black and

      white children all together. Cost was seventy-five cents a day, a dollar

      and a quarter for two kids. “Why that’s not more than I—” Connie

      said, then stopped, but she hadn’t been heard or understood. “Oh pre-

      cious,” she said: a boy in rompers, a smiling nurse bent down to hear

      him. “ ‘Fresh fruits and vegetables are abundant, grown in the huge

      Victory Gardens in surrounding fields.’ ”

      They each turned the magazine to themselves to look, and passed it

      on. The sweep of the corn rows was like the curving sweep of the win-

      dowed nursery wall, like the sweep of the drafting tables under their

      banks of lights. They read every word. “If the world could be like this,”

      Buster said.

      When it was growing dark, Connie and his grandmother wrapped

      Adolph up again in his warm suit as he looked from one face to the

      other. Sometimes doing this Connie thought she could remember what

      236 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

      it had been like to be handled this way, by big loving smiling people

      who did everything for you.

      It was so clear outside you could see stars, though the sky was pale

      and green at the horizon, the thin bare trees and the buildings and the

      metal trellis of the overpass as though drawn in ink with fearful preci-

      sion. Adolph lay against her, put to sleep by her motion. Bunce had

    &nb
    sp; said that ages ago, when we all were living in the woods, you had to

      keep quiet as you traveled so the wolves and such wouldn’t hear you,

      which means it’s natural that babies would fall asleep when their moth-

      ers walk. It makes sense.

      You have to fight for him. Your man. She heard herself say it to her-

      self. You have to not let him go, you have to fight, you can fight and

      you have to. The hard heels of her shoes struck the pavement. You have

      to go and fight for your man. It was part of what you had to do, and

      she knew she would.

      The next day at the plant it was evident that something big was wrong.

      Lines had stopped moving that were always going when she got there;

      some of the ever-present racket was stilled, which made the place seem

      somehow bigger, empty and expectant. Before noon Connie ran out of

      parts to shape, and the little electric truck didn’t roll by with more.

      Sometimes that had happened before, but she’d never had to wait more

      than a few minutes before it came, driven too fast by the man with one

      built-up shoe on his short leg. Connie looked around for the supervi-

      sor, but he wasn’t where he usually was. There was nothing to do but

      stand by her machine, ready to go. She felt conspicuous even though no

      one was looking her way, except the man at the next machine whom

      she distrusted, who left his place with a foxy grin her way, took a seat

      on some boxes and lit a forbidden smoke.

      Just then the noon horn sounded, though it wasn’t nearly lunch-

      time. Everyone stopped working; some people downed tools and drifted

      toward the lunchroom and then came back again. Connie saw coming

      down the line a number of men, her own supervisor and some others in

      shirtsleeves, and three or four men grim-faced in overcoats and hats

      whom she had seen roving through the plant lately asking questions

      and making notes. They stopped at each station and said a few words

      F O U R F R E E D O M S / 237

      to the workers and went on. The man next down from Connie listened

      and then tossed his cigarette to the floor and ground it with his heel in

      disgust.

      “The plant’s closing, sweetheart,” said the man who reached her

      first. She could see that a badge was clipped to his lapel beneath the

      overcoat. “Everybody’s going to be let go. Pack your gear and go down

     


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