was really like—a lot different than you might think! The person
I remember best was a fellow whose name was Prosper, though
for the life of me I can’t remember his last name. He was handi-
capped and walked with two crutches, or two canes I think; as
I remember he worked in the print shop with an awful man who
wrote press releases and harassed everyone. Well he had a lot to
overcome (this Prosper I mean) but he was always so cheerful
and optimistic and gave everyone who knew him a boost. He
was a good friend to me after my husband went into the Army
and I went to work there as an inspector. My shop number was
128. I guess I came to know him a little more intimately than
anyone else there, and I still can’t account in my mind for what
made him the way he was, and how for all the trouble he’d had
in his life he could take the trouble to make another person just
feel all right inside.
8
Back then, Connie had wondered at Prosper too, just as Vi had:
wondered at something that seemed so impervious in him,
unbroken, undiscourageable. Lying beside his bare body in the
spare bed in her house on N Street, Connie thought it was almost
spooky: he was like one of those cheerful ghosts in the movies, who
seem to have nothing left to lose, and only goodwill toward the living
among whom they fade in and out, making things right.
He was no ghost though. She put her hand tentatively down where
his had been, and also where he’d. A little sore there. She’d always been
reluctant to touch it much, but he sure hadn’t been, so why should she
be? It was hers.
What made him so complacent about all that, sex, as though it was
easy? He of all people. Surely he couldn’t have been with many women,
not so many that it would make him so—what was the word she
wanted, so certain or steady, and yet so different from an actual ordi-
nary man. She thought of Bunce. How different it was with him. Were
there other different ways for men to be, other than those two? She’d
probably never know. With Bunce it was sometimes more like a test, or
a problem to be solved, only that was wrong because it wasn’t some-
thing you did with your head. There seemed to be rules she didn’t
know, that Bunce thought she’d know; he’d grow tense and watchful
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 281
when she did things wrong, sometimes if she did anything at all. Now
and then his intense attention would remind her of his look when he
played or practiced football and the whole of him was bent on doing
the thing right, the unsmiling intent face and the funny leather hat that
made it almost ridiculous if you weren’t doing it but watching it: in the
bed sometimes too—times when she felt like she was watching and not
doing—it was, just a little, ridiculous, since he was naked except for
his socks, and the big bobbing thing to be managed right.
She laughed or sobbed a little, and Prosper turned a little to touch
her, laughing a little too, so she went quiet.
Bunce had told her that, for a man, every time you spent, you lost a
little time off your life—she couldn’t remember if he’d said a day or a
month—and so every one cost him something, left him just a little
weaker. And that’s what it seemed like.
But oh not always. Not when, helpless and forgetful of all that at
last, he’d just. And in those times it couldn’t be said who carried who
forward, whether he’d surrendered to her or she to him. Those times it
seemed to go on forever even though it was only a few minutes, seemed
to be forever in the way they said immortal souls live outside time.
They became “one with”—Father Mulcahy said you could become one
with Jesus our Savior, one with Mary our Mother. Connie didn’t know
what that would be like but she did know, in those moments with
Bunce, what one with meant. She was one with him then. Oh Bunce.
Prosper stirred beside her, strange bones of his stranger body on
her, and a dark grief unlike any she’d known arose like something she’d
swallowed and couldn’t expel.
“What is it?” Prosper asked her softly. “Huh?”
She wouldn’t say. She wept, but he wouldn’t just let her, cheerful
himself and smiling, wanting to know, to make her feel better, as
though nothing could really be the matter, hey come on, until she rose
up and turned to him, face wet.
“What’s up?” he said.
“What’s up, what’s up?” she cried at him. “I’m cheating on my hus-
band! He’s gone to be a soldier and he’s gone for one day and I’m
cheating on him! I’m cheating on him with a cripple!”
She plunged her face into the pillow and sobbed, as much so that
she wouldn’t think of what she’d just said as to mourn or keen. After a
282 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
bit though she stopped. She wiped her face with the pillow slip and
turned her face to him, to see how terribly angry he was. He was hard
to read in the predawn, but he wasn’t looking her way; his eyes cast
down, diminished, maybe crushed.
“So,” he said softly, and she waited. “So does that mean,” not rais-
ing his eyes to her, “I mean, if you feel that way about it—well I can
understand, but does that mean you don’t want me to come back?”
Prosper hadn’t, honestly hadn’t, expected all of that to happen, uneasily
glad as he was that it had, and sorry as he’d be if it had to stop. He’d
only come to the house on N Street (identical to his own) to show that
he was truly now up and about, on his own, good as new or at least as
good as he had been before, due to her ministrations, and to bring her
a bottle of wine, Italian Swiss Colony, that he’d asked Pancho to buy
for him on his monthly trip to the wet state next door. He’d also wanted
to show her his new aluminum crutches, though he knew better than
to carry on about them, people found it off-putting and after all they
weren’t (though they might seem so to him) a new sport-model car or a
Buck Rogers rocket belt. Handy was the word he’d use.
Across her face when she opened the door to find him on the door-
step (one thing hard to get in Henryville was telephone service; you’d
have quit and moved back home before they got around to you) was
that changeful flicker of hopeful, but maybe painful, feeling that he
was getting used to. Such a small slight person, so full of emotions.
Anyway all she said was Hello, and asked him in.
He’d asked her how had it gone the day before, at the train station.
Well fine, except that that woman (she’d never ever say Francine’s name
out loud) had the crust to show up too, all dolled up and wearing a veil
and carrying on like some mourner at Valentino’s grave—as though
she had a right! And Bunce himself, carrying the little bag Connie’d
packed for him, had walked away with her down the platform, leaving
his wife and son standing there. Just standing there! And after she’d
gone away and Bunce had returned to Connie, well it was hard to wait
for the train with him and say good-bye as she should, with all her