ent: but this was now and not then. Which in a way seemed to him
dreadfully and wholly sad, even though he supposed he had been a
beneficiary of that situation, and perhaps even had done some women
some good that they wouldn’t have got otherwise, which was somehow
sad too. In fact he couldn’t decide which was sadder, and tried not to
ponder it too much. He guessed that there would be time for that soon
enough.
He ordered a Cuba libre. Soon the band stopped playing and the
singer softly and sincerely said good night.
Late December 1944 and there are fifty B-30s on the tarmac at Ponca
City, unable to be flown out until whatever’s wrong with their engine
cowlings or their oil tanks or ignition processes is discovered and fixed.
We couldn’t stop making them, for what would be done with us and all
our skills and training, all our tools and procedures, then? So—a little
more slowly, a little more thoroughly—we went on making them, the
Teenie Weenies doing more standing around than before (as the Teenie
Weenies in the comic pages are all doing most of the time while the
active ones explore or labor). And then one more is drawn out the great
doors to join the flock of others pointed toward the West and the enemy
but going nowhere. When the doors open the icy fog rolls in and rises
to the height of the ceiling above, to linger there like a lost black
cloud.
How cold and dark that winter of ’44–’45 was. In the North it was
the bitterest in years; the lack of fuel oil was life threatening in some
places, places far from Ponca City, we heard it on the radio, eyewit-
ness. It seemed harder because for a while it looked like the war in
Europe at least was almost over. War production was cut back and
some items unseen since before the war began to return to the stores—
irons, pots and pans, stoves, refrigerators. Then came the huge
Ardennes counteroffensive and the Battle of the Bulge and the mad
resistance in the Pacific at every atoll and beach, and the planners
thought again. Some controls on metals and other things were reim-
posed; new ration books were issued, and not only that: all your
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 355
unspent ration points from ’44 were invalidated. Everybody started
1945 with a new damn book, same old rules to follow, now maybe
forever: that winter suspicion that the sun’s not ever going to return.
Except now people didn’t feel so ready to sacrifice, we were tired of all
that, so tired, and so back came Mr. Black in a big way, the stuff you
wanted was there if you could find it, gas traded for whatever you had,
farm-butchered beef and pork removed from the system and sold out of
meat lockers that you knew about if you knew.
Those who are going into the services now, boys out of high school,
the rejects of the factories, the once but no longer deferred, know they
will be the last: the boys mostly eager for the chance, desperate to grow
old enough in time, others perhaps feeling differently. Now the lives of
men killed and wounded far away seem to have been wasted, a loss
insupportable, and more are dying now than in the frenzy of begin-
ning—in the climb up useless Italy, in the frozen mud of the Ardennes,
in the assaults on palm tree islands in nowhere, for nothing. It’s begin-
ning to be possible to think so, though you’d never say it. For the first
time, photographs of the prostrate bodies of our men are shown to us,
on beaches, in the snow: the dead in Life. Why now? Is it a warning, a
judgment, a caution—you see this now but you will see far worse if you
slacken? We don’t know.
At Van Damme Aero Ponca City a woman walks down the long
nave of the Assembly Building with a steady tread, eyes looking neither
left nor right. It’s Mona the mail girl, with a telegram. The edge of the
yellow form can be seen in the front pouch of her bag. A mail girl’s
never seen on the floor if she’s not bringing one, she never brings just
mail, you get that at home or at the post office, they bring mail to the
offices of the managers and bosses but not to Associates out on the
floor. Of all the mail girls in their night blue uniforms it’s Mona who is
always chosen to deliver the telegram: tall and phlegmatic, vast black
pelt of hair over her brow and shoulders, black brows knitted together
in the middle over the prow of her nose—those who watch her pass
know these details, there have been opportunities to study her. When
she comes through the floor, her long slow steps, a zone of silence
moves with her, leaving a stillness in its wake even if those behind take
up their work again, spared this time; and the silence moves on ahead,
and spreads around her when she stops.
356 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Mrs. Bunce Wrobleski?” Mona asks, drawing out the telegram.
They know; they stop working but they don’t—most don’t, out of pity
or to honor her privacy—look at Connie taking the flimsy form from
Mona; Mona because she can do this task without weeping herself,
can stand dark and silent there long enough for respect but not too
long.
MRS BUNCE WROBLESKI
VAN DAMME AERO PONCA CITY OKLA=
THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP
REGRET THAT YOUR HUSBAND CPL BUNCE J WROBLESKI WAS
KILLED IN ACTION 05 JAN 1945 LETTER FOLLOWS=
JA WILLIAM THE ADJUTANT GENERAL
Once General Marshall wrote these letters in his own hand. Now
there are too many, too many even to count yet. Nor can the silence of
that moment last a long time. The women around Connie (the men
won’t come forward or can’t or don’t know how) shelter her, and help
her to her feet from where she has sat helplessly down; and they hold
her one by one and help her off the floor even when she says No, no, let
me go, let me just go on, there’s so much, so much to do.
After a time we do start up again, and the silence disperses.
7
Connie went back north with Andy to bring him to see his grand-
parents, to leave him there for a while so they could have him
with them; after a while she could come back, go on working.
She’d got a letter telling her how to collect on Bunce’s standard
government insurance policy, he must have told her he had one but she
didn’t remember him doing so and she’d stared down at the letter and
the huge amount of money feeling sick and horrified, as at some loath-
some joke. She’d already been informed that Bunce wouldn’t be brought
home, not now, that there were just too many to bring home; he’d be
buried with the thousands there in the land he’d died in, it hurt her
heart to think of it, and to think what Buster and his mom must feel.
She had to go back, for them. So she wrapped her son in the warm
winter clothes he’d worn when they left the North, and they boarded
the train, the same train.
“Good-bye, Prosper.”
“Good-bye, Connie.”
“I’ll see you again soon.”
“Sure. I’ll be seeing you.”
“Are you all right? What is it?”
“Yes sure. Just my back.”
358 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Your back hurts?”
“My back hurts some all the time, Connie. Almost all the time.”
“You never said.”
“No reason to say. Get on board, Connie.”
“God bless you, Prosper.”
Going through the prairie and the river valleys Connie seemed to
see all that she couldn’t see when she had come the other way: the
shabby towns and the weary old cars, the streets without people,
unpainted storefronts, peeling billboards advertising things that no