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
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