best sense of how a man should live. I have done the same work for
decades, never changing, never learning, without friends beside me,
without associates, without the refreshment of change, without
delight.” He turned to Prosper. “Not that this makes me in any way
different from millions.”
“I shouldn’t say so,” Prosper said.
“Well and you?” the salesman asked him.
“Ah. Well I was privately employed.”
“Ah.”
They said no more for a long time. Prosper studied the places they
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 45
passed, that seemed to come into being merely by his entering them, and
then to persist behind him as he and Pancho and the Zephyr made more.
Fields and farms appearing, then after a time the outskirts of a town,
sometimes announced with a proud sign (greenfield—a friendly
town) and the totem pole of the local lodges and clubs, Masons, Lions,
Odd Fellows. The last and least farms passed, then the more decrepit
and dirtier businesses, the ice-and-coal supplier and the lumberyard,
then the first paved streets of houses and neighborhood shops, maybe a
mill with its strings of joined workers’ houses like city streets displaced.
The better neighborhoods, a white church or a stone one, big houses
with wide yards and tended shrubbery, but the biggest one an undertak-
ers’. Then downtown, brick buildings of three and four stories, hero on
a plinth, the larger churches, a domed granite courthouse on Court-
house Square.
“Well take a good look,” said Pancho a little bitterly when Prosper
noted these trim towns, each different but all alike. “These places
won’t last. They’ll be drained of population. They’re the past, these old
mills. People’ll go where the work is, and that’s the big plants in the big
cities or the new cities now a-building. That’s the future.”
“I’d like to see the future,” Prosper said. “All the wonders.”
“You are a Candide,” Pancho said. “You think this is the best of all
possible worlds. Or will be.”
“I can’t be a Candide,” said Prosper.
“And why not?”
“Because I’ve read the book.”
Esso station, five-and-dime, A & P. Pancho contemned the big chain
stores, displacing local businesses, substituting standardized needs and
ways of meeting them for individual taste and satisfaction.
“They say that this new finance capitalism’s efficient. Actually it’s
inefficient, and the more the owners are divorced from the operations
of it the more inefficient it can get. They claim ‘efficiency of scale’—
they don’t know that when you scale something up it doesn’t always
work the same. It’s just as when a great corporation claims the same
right as an individual to the freedoms guaranteed by our forefathers in
1776. A nice piece of sophistry. As if Nabisco was not different from a
man running his own bakeshop here in this town.”
The bakeshop Pancho pointed to looked welcoming. It was called
46 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Mom’s and had red-and-white calico curtains in the window, and Pros-
per thought of calling a halt to buy some supplies, but Pancho hunched
over the wheel seemed unlikely to hear, and then Mom’s was gone, and
the Ball Building, and the fire station. The railroad tracks, after which
the houses grew poorer and fewer, some streets of Negroes, then
scarcer, with vacant lots and abandonment (the hard times hardly
gone) until once more fields and farms began, much like the earlier
ones but not them. Tractors plowing in contour lines like marcelled
brown hair, because spring was rushing upward toward them as they
went down.
Sometime after dark they came upon a long low establishment
roofed in Spanish tile (so Pancho said it was) with a floodlit sign in
front that commanded that they dine-dance and offered them steaks
chops chicken, though it was unlikely that it’d have much of that
these days, or much of anything to drink either, but by then the
Zephyr’d been traveling a long time; the road had been bare of other
choices, and didn’t look to be getting better.
“It’s a law of life,” Pancho said. “Turn down the pretty-good place
and you’ll wander for hours and find nothing as good, end up in a
greasy spoon just closing its doors. Trust me. Years on the road.”
Attached to this place was a cinder block motel, red-tiled too: a
string of red-painted doors, each with a wicker chair beside it and a
window with a calico curtain like Mom’s bakery. Prosper thought that
calico curtains were perhaps to be a feature of travel, and made a note
to watch for more. He had never left the city of his birth before.
“Mo-tel,” Pancho said. “Motor-hotel. A hotel, but one without
bellhops, a cigar stand, newspapers, a front desk, room service, a West-
ern Union office, or any other of the common amenities.”
“Two dollars a night,” Prosper said, pointing to a sign.
“You have an endless capacity to be pleased,” Pancho said gravely.
“That is an enviable quality in youth, and a good thing for a traveler to
have.”
The room that the key given to Pancho let them into was small and
spare, and clad in honey-colored knotty pine, a thing that Prosper had
never seen or smelled before—like living in a hollow tree, he thought.
A single lamp between the two beds was shaped to resemble a large
cactus and a sleeping Mexican. The beds were narrow and the pillows
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 47
ungenerous; there was a shower but no tub. A rag rug on the linoleum
floor nearly caught a crutch and spilled him: Prosper was opposed to
linoleum floors, and to rag rugs. But still he loved the place immedi-
ately, and would come to love all motels, with but one shallow stair up
to the little cloister that protected the doors, sometimes not even that,
out of the car and in, and there you were.
He deposited his knapsack and Pancho lugged in a suitcase and his
sample cases, washed his hands, and they went to eat in the wide build-
ing fronting the motel. Prosper had never been in one of these either,
though he knew right away what name to call it: the air of weary gaiety,
glow of the cigarette machine, couple drinking over there with another
male whose role was unguessable, blond waitress with challenging eyes
and bitter mouth— “ A roadhouse,” he said to Pancho. “Just like in
True Story.”
“Just like in what true story?” Pancho asked.
Prosper told him to never mind.
There were, amid the items crossed off on the menu, enough to
make a meal, and whiskey, a surprise. They each ordered one. Pancho,
having rapidly downed his, described to Prosper the principles of Besto-
pianism, which he claimed were in fact not different from the principles
of natural life and common sense. “This isn’t hard,” he said. “You ask:
What makes a person happy? Not one thing that will make all men
everywhere happy, but this person here and now. And next question,
How’s he going to get it? That’s all. Answer those questions. Let every
person answer the first. Society should answer the second.”
“Uh-huh,” Prosper said. “So what’s the answer?”
Pancho regarded him with a penetrating look, and for the first time
Prosper discerned the penetration might be due to a slight cast in one
of his close-set wide-open eyes. It made for a furious or accusatory
look Prosper didn’t think he meant.
“The answer,” he said, “is the wholesale reorganization of human