“I’d like,” Diane said—her cheeks flushed and eyes alight as though
she’d already consumed it—“a Cuba libre, please.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 323
“I’ll have the same,” Prosper said, not quite sure what it was. The
volunteer barman filled two glasses with ice and snapped the tops from
two bottles of Coca-Cola. He added a shot of clear rum to each glass,
and then the Coke.
“Wha,” said Prosper.
“Should have a lemon,” the barman said, “but we’re fresh out.”
Diane picked up the glasses—both his and hers, without hesitation
or inquiry, which endeared her to him immediately, and brought them
to a table.
“Why Cuba libre?” he asked.
She lifted one shoulder fetchingly. She was a different person here
than in the plant. “It means Free Cuba,” she said. “Maybe from that
war?”
“Remember the Maine, ” Prosper said and lifted his glass to her.
The band was just setting up on the stage, the drummer tapping
and tightening his drumheads. There was a trio of lady singers, like the
Andrews Sisters, going over sheet music.
Diane told him (he asked, he wanted to know) about Danny, her
guy, flying a Hellcat in the Pacific. She got V-mail from him, not often:
little funny notes about coconuts and palm trees and grass skirts, not
what you really wanted to know, because of course he couldn’t say. She
lifted her dark drink from another war, and looked at nothing.
“So he,” Prosper began, just a nudge, he had nothing to say; and
though it didn’t draw her eyes to him she told him more, remembering
more. The Lucky Duck. The journey across the desert. At last the lost
baby.
“Aw,” he said. “Aw Diane.”
She shrugged again, a different kind. “I really only knew him a
couple of weeks. Not even a month, and I wasn’t with him unless he
could get a pass.”
“Testing, testing,” said the bandleader into the microphone.
“I can almost not remember what he looks like. Sometimes I dream
of him, but it’s never him. It’s like different actors playing him.”
“Hello hello,” said the bandleader. “Hello and welcome.”
Diane downed her drink as though Coke was all it was, and
crunched an ice cube in her small white teeth. “We weren’t even really
married,” she said. “Not by what the Catholic Church says.”
324 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Oh?”
“That’s what my mother thinks. Didn’t count.”
“Oh.”
She smiled at him, her funny life. Around them men and women
were taking the tables. Prosper lifted a hand to people he knew: press-
men from the office, engineers who’d appeared in the Aero, Shop 128
women. More women than men.
The bandleader, shoe-blacking hair and boutonniere, at last turned
to his men and women—half the horns and clarinets were women—
and with his little wand beat out the rhythm. All at once the place
changed, filled with that clamor, always so much louder than it was on
the radio.
“Like a school dance,” Diane said. “The girls dance with the girls
till the boys get brave.” She’d begun to move in her seat as though
dancing sitting down, and then without apology or hesitation she got
up, twiddled a good-bye to Prosper, and went to the floor, where in a
moment another woman was with her, jitterbugging tentatively. Pros-
per, new to all this except as it could be seen in the movies, felt that
dancing itself must be a female endeavor or art, the men diminished
and graceless where in other realms of life they were the sure ones.
Not that guy in the flowered shirt, though, shined shoes twinkling.
The three women singers, their identically coiffed heads together,
sang in brassy harmony, reading from their sheet music, they hadn’t
yet got this one under their belts, about the Atchison, Topeka, and
Santa Fe.
Big cheers for the local road, and the atmosphere intensified, but
when the song was done Diane met Prosper over at the bar to which
he’d repaired.
“Wowser,” she said. “It seems so long.”
“Since when?”
“Since I was dancing last.” She touched his elbow. “Thanks.”
So they had another Cuba libre, which seemed stronger than the
first, and they sat again and drank. Whenever the right song was played
Diane would pat his hand and flash him a smile and head for the floor,
and Prosper could see that she moved differently from the others, at
once forceful and supple, a snap to her waist and behind that no one
else had; the men were taking her away from the women now and
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 325
doing their best, but when the bandleader yelled “Ay-yi-yi!” and started
a rhumba they fell away, all but the guy in the flowered shirt.
Whenever she came back to sit with Prosper, though, she’d take his
hand under the table and hold it. Surprised at first, he thought he was
supposed to figure out what she meant by this, if it was a secret signal,
but soon decided it didn’t mean anything, her face never turned to his
to share any secret, she just did it: maybe it just meant that she’d dance
with him if he could, or that she was dancing with him there as they
sat. And it wasn’t late when she yawned and said she’d had enough,
really. He walked with her back across the still-warm tarmac, around
the ever-burning main buildings, to the women’s dorm.
“So have you seen your friend the inspector?” she asked as they
walked.
“Oh. No. Not really. I mean she.” Since Bunce had come and then
gone again, Connie had seemed to lift herself above the plane where he
and the rest of the world lived, her eyes somehow looking far off,
toward where he’d gone, from where he’d return. “She’s working over-
time, I guess.”
“Well.” She turned to him at the door past which at this hour he
could not go. “That was fun.”
“I liked it. We’ll do it again.”
She aimed an imaginary pistol at him, one eye closed, and fired:
you’re on.
In her bed in her familiar room again she lay thinking, listening to
her roommate’s breathing in the other bed.
She thought what a nice fellow that was, how modest and funny
and honest, seeming to be honest anyway, without any designs on her
as the nuns used to say, easy enough to spot those.
She thought about Danny far away, trying to say a prayer for him,
trying to remember in more than a dreamlike way his face, his laughter
at his own jokes, his touch. She should write to him.
She thought about V-mail. About her mother fetching the little
forms from the post office so that she could write one to Danny to tell
him that she’d lost the baby. How many sheets she’d begun before she
could say it plainly. His answer back, a month later, the dread with
which she’d opened it, afraid of his grief, disappointment, anger even,
though that was crazy to think, at her failure somehow. And his answer
326 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
when it came not any of those things, just telling her it was okay, he’d
come home and they’d make a dozen babies together, look ahead not
back. She thought maybe you couldn’t go to war, couldn’t fly a flimsy
little plane over an ocean, unless you could keep your head and your
smile like that. The little shrunken gray V-mail letter, like a voice heard
speaking at a distance.
She got up quietly from her bed and went to the window, having
thought now too much. The sky seemed to have been heated to glow-
ing by the plant and its lights. When she was well enough after the