you too.”
“Oh my God my baby!” Connie reached with both hands into the
closet and lifted Adolph out. Now he was crying, crying Mommy into
her ear in awful gladness and clinging hard around her neck. “How
long has he been in there?” Connie said to Mrs. Freundlich. “How
could you do that, how could you,” she cried, even as she bore the
child out of the bedroom and out of the apartment as though from a
fire. “You awful woman!”
“Serves him right,” said Mrs. Freundlich, tramping after her, still
red-faced and defiant. “All’s I can say.”
Connie pushed past her and out the door.
“You’ll want his trousers,” the old woman called after her.
Back in her own kitchen Connie decided that the best thing to do
was never to speak to Adolph about what had happened in that place,
never, and just love her son and teach him he was a good good boy and
he didn’t need to be afraid of anybody or anything. She told him so
now, even as she tried to get him to loosen his hold on her; she could
feel his heart beating against her.
“You’re a good boy,” she said. “A good boy.”
In another part of her heart and mind she was making calculations,
counting money she had and money she could get. She kept thinking
and counting while Adolph napped in the bed beside her—unwilling to
let her go, his big blond head buried in her side. When he awoke and
after he ate, Connie pulled out his potty from where it was kept behind
the bathroom door.
“I don’t want to, Mommy,” he said, regarding it with something
like alarm, its white basin, its decals of rabbit and kitty.
“It’s okay,” Connie said. “Just try.”
He hung back. Connie at last knelt before him, bringing her face
right before his. “Okay, honey,” she said. “Listen. We have to go on a
trip. You and me. Okay? On a train. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“We’re going to go find your daddy. Okay?”
“Okay.”
It occurred to Connie that sons had to love their fathers, but that if
you were two years old and had never lived a human life before, you
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 241
might not think it was strange to have your father leave. You wouldn’t
think anything was strange; you wouldn’t know. You’d know well
enough what you wanted and what you didn’t, though.
“So you have to learn,” she said, holding his shoulders in her hands.
“To go in the potty. So we can travel, ride on the train. Okay?”
Of this he was less sure. He said nothing.
“Two weeks,” Connie said. It would take her that long to close up
the apartment, tell her parents and Bunce’s parents, a hot wave of
shame and foreboding at that thought, but this first, nothing without
this. She held up a V of fingers before him. “That’s how long you have,
till we leave. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay!”
He was laughing now, and she started to laugh too. It was true and
it was urgent, but it was funny too. “Two. Weeks,” she said again.
“You bunny.”
3
They stretched the rules at the Van Damme dormitory in Henryville
to let her have a space, because no children were allowed; it didn’t
seem to Connie that it was the first time the women at the desk
had stretched the rules, or that the rules were all that important
to them. They only needed to know that Adolph was toilet trained, and
Connie could say Yes. Not a single accident since far to the north on the
Katy Line, too late a warning, too long a line at the smelly toilet. Actu-
ally he’d got used to facilities of several kinds—rows of station toilets
with clanging steel doors, overused toilets like squalid privies in crowded
coaches; old Negro porters helped him, soldiers too, hey give the little
kid a break. Once in a train so filled with soldiers and sailors it was
impossible to move, they’d passed him hand to hand over the heads of
the passengers till the far end of the coach was reached—he’d been game
even for that, seeming to get braver and more ready for things with
every mile. Now and then he’d whined and wept, and once worked up a
nice tantrum, as though the new self coming out hurt like teething: but
Connie’d have worried for him if he hadn’t had one at least.
So the dormitory people tucked a little roller cot into the room she
was allotted, best they could do, and after she’d whispered a story into
his ear about trains and planes and cars, he slept. Exhausted as she
was, she couldn’t: not even his soft automatic breathing could seduce
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 243
her into sleep. The small room was meant for four, two bunk beds,
their ticking-covered mattresses rolled up, only her bed made. Like the
first girl in a summer-camp cabin. The sheets were rough and clean.
For a moment she wanted not to wonder at any of it, or think of it, just
lie and look and feel. She was nowhere she’d ever thought to be.
Those two men who’d given her a ride out here hadn’t been able to
think of a way to find Bunce: the plant and its processes went on around
the clock, but offices where inessential paperwork was done closed
sometimes, and the union office was closed too when they tried to call
there from the desk of the dormitory.
That crippled fellow: looking around the dormitory lounge where
the women sat or played cards or table tennis or just came and went.
The expression on his face. Never been inside here, he’d said. Connie
wanted to tell him to withdraw a bit; he looked like a kid in a toy store,
watching the electric train go around. Maybe that’s why she tugged his
coat, made him turn to face her, thanked him and kissed his cheek
with gratitude. She thought about him, his handicap, what that would
be like. She thought of the first day she’d gone to work at the Bull
plant. It had taken all her strength to act on what she’d known she had
to do—to get here with Adolph—and she didn’t know what she’d do
now, or what would come of it. She slept.
That night a hundred miles and more to the north of Ponca City, Muriel
Gunderson headed out on the dirt road from town to Little Tom Field
and the weather station there. Muriel was on rotation with three other
FAA weather observers, and while two shared the day and evening
shifts, Muriel would be all by herself on the 0000 to 0008 shift. The
drive out to the station was twenty miles—she got extra stamps—and
while she didn’t mind the night she got lonely and fretful sometimes, so
she brought her old dog Tootie along with her for the company.
She let herself into the weather station, a small gray building and a
shed between the two hangars that Little Tom Field offered. A couple
of Jennys and an old retired Kaydet were tied up by their noses out on
the field. She lit the lights and checked the instrument array, the ther-
mometer, the wet bulb, and then the anemometer, which was at the top
of a pole on the roof. She had to climb up the outside stair and then up
244 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
a staggered row of iron footholds, detach the machine, take it down
into the station, and record the wind speed—not much at all this still
night—and then climb back up the pole to replace it while Tootie
barked at her from below. She was always nervous about climbing the
pole, not because she was afraid of heights—she wasn’t, and was glad
she’d wiped the grin off the face of the chief observer when he first told