man as he is: a creature of his needs and his desires. Nothing wrong
with it—I take no exception to it, even if I could. It seems to me that we
have no business telling people what they should or shouldn’t want.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 9
Happiness means meeting the desires a person has, not suppressing
them.”
“Happiness is a plate of ribs, Mr. Notzing,” said a young fellow,
raising his plate, sucking a greasy thumb.
“Have more,” said Pancho, flipping a rack and watching the happy
flames leap up. “Nobody in this present world has enough pleasure.
They feel it, too. The poor man never gets enough, and he hates the
rich man because the rich man supposedly gets his fill—but he doesn’t.
The rich are eternally afraid that the poor will take away what plea-
sures they have, they indulge themselves constantly but never feel
filled—they feel guilty. Meanwhile they hoard the wealth, more than
they can ever spend or use or eat or drink.”
“Are you saying,” Sal Mass chirped up, “Mr. Notzing, sir, are you
saying money don’t buy happiness?”
Pancho Notzing was immune to sarcasm. Those close enough to
hear her odd chirpy voice laughed. Old Sal.
Sal was the only one of the Teenie Weenies (except for her husband,
Al Mass) who really was one, and not only in the sense that she was an
actual midget. Ten years before she had played one of the little charac-
ters in a promotion for a canned food company; she’d flown, she said,
ten thousand miles and into three hundred airports, dressed as the
Lady of Fashion, her husband, Al, as the Cook, inviting people aboard
the Ford Trimotor they traveled in to look over the cans and packages
of food, the Pepper Pickles, the Chipped Beef, the Hearts of Wheat, the
Succotash, the Harvard Beets, the Soda Crackers. Handing out free
samples and little cookbooks. She knew she disappointed the children
who came, because the Teenie Weenies in the funny papers were really
teeny, no larger than your thumb, and she and Al were small but not
that small, and now and again she’d get a kick in the shins from some
kid who wanted her to be at least smaller than he was, which is what
all kids wanted she decided, though it didn’t explain why grown-ups
came and clambered into their plane and made much of them. What
Sal wanted was to fly the Ford herself, but no amount of solicitude, or
pleading, or showing off, or anything could get the pilot to do more
than laugh at her. Hell with him. Al just read the paper and smoked his
cigar and snorted. Hey, Hon, here we are in the funnies—see, this
week I try to figure out how to cut up a grape with a saw—Jesus. A
10 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
little later that food company fired them and from then on used a
couple of little kids instead for half the price. That was 1941, and Sal
and Al got hired by Van Damme Aero’s West Coast plant to work on
their A-21 Sword bombers, getting into the small spaces no one else
could get into and riveting. And their selling job went on too, as Sal
showed up again and again in company promotions, in the newsreels,
in Horse Offen’s stories, wearing her bandanna and miniature over-
alls. Al stayed just as mad as ever, midget mad—well, he was one of
those angry midgets she knew so well, he had a right, she paid no
attention. When Van Damme built this plant in the middle of nowhere
(Al’s characterization) and started on the B-30 there seemed at first no
need for midgets, the whole plane was open from end to end and no
space too small for a normal-size worker. But they accepted Sal and Al
anyway when they applied to go out to the new plant, which Sal
thought was white of them; Al just snorted.
“Well,” she said to Pancho, though not for him alone to hear, “I
guess happiness is overrated. Not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“I’m no Utopian,” Pancho said. “I would never say so. I am a modest
fellow. I know better than to demand too much of this world. Noth-
ing’s perfect. You try to build the best world, the best society you can.
I am not a u topian but a best opian.”
All this time the moon had been rising into the cloudless air over
Henryville, nearly full and melon-shaped, huge and gold and then
whiter and smaller as it climbed. The sounds of the banjo, the radio
music, and the people’s voices moved with the sluggish air block to
block and reached into the bedroom where Prosper Olander sat on the
edge of Connie Wrobleski’s bed with a Lucky Lager of her husband’s
growing warm in his hand. He was listening to Connie, who was tell-
ing her story, which was in a way the story of how she happened to be
here in bed with Prosper. She’d stop often to say things like Oh jeez I
don’t know or I never expected this, that meant she was giving up
trying to explain herself, and at the same time keeping the door open
to going on, which in time after a sigh she did, only to stop again to
question herself or the world or Fate. Prosper listened—he did listen,
because what she had to say was new to him, the part that was proving
hard for her to say, and he liked her and wanted to know what she
thought—but always as he sat his eyes went to the pair of new crutches
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 11
now propped in the corner. Boy were they something beautiful, he
couldn’t get enough of an eyeful, they leaned together there gleaming
new, preening, proud. They had been built at the plant just for him by
machinists on their breaks, and they were, as far as Prosper knew, the
only pair like them in the world: slim strong light aluminum tubes with
hinged aluminum cuffs covered in leather to go around his forearms
and posts for his hands to grip, clad in hard rubber. They weighed
nothing. His poor underarms, eternally chafed from the tops of the old
wooden ones he had used for years—the parts of himself he felt most
sorry for, while everybody else felt sorry about his ski-jump spine and
marionette’s legs—the skin there was healing already.
“Oh if I don’t shut up I’m going to start crying,” Connie said. Con-
nie’s husband was in basic training a long way away, and he’d be off to
war most likely soon thereafter, and here was Prosper beside his wife
in his house, in nothing but his skivvies too; but there was no doubt in
Prosper’s mind that they two weren’t the only ones in Henryville, or
Oklahoma, or in these States, who were in similar circumstances. It
was the war, and the war work, and those circumstances wouldn’t last
forever, but just on this night Prosper seemed unable to remember or
imagine any others.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “Don’t cry, Connie.”
These crutches. Look at the slight dog-leg each one took in heading
for the ground, each different for his different legs. These crutches
were, what, they were angelic, they were spiritual in their weightless
strength and their quick helpful patience. God bless them. His own
invention. He tried not to show it, in the circumstances, but he couldn’t
&
nbsp; help thinking that in a lot of ways he was a lucky man.
PART ONE
1
For a time after the war began, the West Coast would go dark every
night in expectation of air attacks. Who knew, now, how far the
Japs could reach, what damage they might be able to inflict? We
mounted citizen patrols that went up and down and made people
draw their shades, put out their lamps. The stores and bars along the
boardwalks and arcades that faced the ocean had to be equipped with
light traps, extra doors to keep the light inside. In cities all along the
Pacific we looked up from the darkened streets and saw for the first
time in years the stars, all unchanged. But every once in a while, star-
tled by some report or rumor, the great searchlights of the coastal bat-
teries—eight hundred million candlepower they said, whatever that
could mean—would come on and stare for a time out at the empty sea.
Then go off again.
Van Damme Aero was already in the business of building warplanes
before hostilities commenced, and after Pearl Harbor their West Coast
plant was fulfilling government contracts worth millions, with more
signed every month. A mile-square array of tethered balloons was sus-
pended just over Van Damme Aero’s ramifying works and its workers
like darkening thunderclouds, a summer storm perpetually hovering,
so that from above, from the viewpoint of a reconnaissance plane or a
bomber, the plant was effectually invisible. More than that: the sheds
16 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
and yards and hangars not only seemed not to be there, they also
seemed to be something, or somewhere, else: for the topsides of all
those balloons had been painted as a landscape, soft rolling hills of
green and yellow, with here and there a silver lakelet and the brown
furrows of farmland, even (so they said down under it, who would
never see it and went on rumors) the roofs of a village, spire of a church,
red barns and a silo. A pastorale, under which round the clock the A-
21 Sword bombers were riveted and welded and fitted with engines and
wings, and the huge Robur cargo seaplanes were given birth to like
monster whales. Even when the danger of an invasion of the mainland
seemed to have passed (leaving us still jumpy and unsettled but at least
not cowering, not always looking to the sky at the whine of every Cub
or Jenny), every day the Van Damme Aero workers coming to work
dove under that landscape and it was hard not to laugh about it.
From the Van Damme shop floor where Al and Sal Mass then
worked with a thousand others you could see, if you knew where to
look, a bank of broad high dark windows behind which were the con-
ference and meeting rooms of the Van Damme directors. Guests (Army
Air Corps generals, government officials, union bosses) brought into
that wide low-ceilinged space, to look down upon the ceaseless activity
below—the windows faced the length of the shop, which seemed almost
to recede into infinite working distance—could feel superb, in com-
mand, and they would be awed as well, as they were intended to be.
On a day in the spring of 1942 the only persons assembled up in
there were the engineering and employment vice presidents and their
assistants, and Henry and Julius Van Damme. On a streamlined plinth
in the middle of the room was a model of a proposed long-range heavy
bomber that Van Damme Aero and the rest of the air industry and the
appropriate government agencies were trying to bring forth. Julius Van
Damme kept his back to the model, not wanting to be influenced
unduly by its illusory facticity, the very quality of it that kept his
brother Henry’s eyes on it. It was canted into the air, as though in the
process of taking a tight rising turn at full power. It wasn’t the largest
heavier-than-air flying thing ever conceived, but it would be the largest
built to date, if it were built, maybe excepting a few tremendous Van
Damme cargo seaplanes on the drawing boards; anyway it wasn’t a
tubby lumbering cargo plane but a long slim bomber, designed to inflict
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 17
harm anywhere in the world from bases in the continental United
States. It had been conceived even before December 1941, back when
Britain was expected to fall and there would be no forward bases any
closer to Germany than Goose Bay from which to run bombers. The
plane was designated (at the moment) XB-30, the X for experimental
or in plan. B-30 would be its model number in the complex rubric of
the American air forces. As yet it had no name. The Model Committee
was making a preliminary presentation of the latest mock-up and
specs. It was somewhat dim in the huge dark-brown room, the
brilliantly lit shop floor below giving more light than the torchères of
the office.
“In this configuration, six pusher twenty-six-cylinder R-400 Bee
air-cooled radials, each to drive a seventeen-and-a-half-foot three-
bladed propeller.” The chief of engineering made dashes at the model,
ticking off the features, his long black pencil like a sorcerer’s wand sum-
moning the B-30 into existence. “Wingspan’s increased now to 225 feet
with an area of, well, just a hair over 4,000 square feet, depending.”
“Depending on what?” Julius said, picking up a slide rule.
“I’ll be making that clear. The wing, as you see, a certain degree of
sweepback. Fuel tanks within the wings, here, here, each with a capac-
ity of 21,000 gallons. Wing roots are over seven feet thick and give
access to the engines for maintenance in flight.”
Julius unrolled the next broad blue sheet.
“Twin fin-and-rudder format, like our A-21 and the Boeing Domi-
nator now in plan, though lots bigger naturally, thirty-five-foot overall
height.” Here the engineer swallowed, as though he had told a lie, and
his eyes swept the faces of the others, Julius’s still bent over the sheets.
“Sixty-foot fuselage, circular cross section as you can see. Four bomb
bays with a maximum capacity of 40,000 pounds in this bottom
bumpout that runs nearly the length of the fuselage. Forward crew
compartment pressurized, and also the gunners’ weapons sighting
station compartment behind the bomb bay. A pressurized tube runs
over the bomb bays to connect the forward crew compartment to the
rear gunners’ compartment.”
“How big a tube?” Henry Van Damme asked.
“Just over two feet in diameter.”
Henry, who was claustrophobic, shuddered.
18 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Crew has a sort of wheeled truck they can slide on to go from one
end to the other,” said the engineer.
For a while they gazed at it, the paper version and the model still
climbing. The dome of the forward crew compartment, pierced with a
multitude of Plexiglas panels, swelled from the slim body of the fuse-
lage like a mushroom cap from its stem but smoothed away under-
neath. A snake’s head, a.
“I hate the pusher engines,” Henry said. “They make the ship look
dumb.”
“They�
��re necessary to get the damn thing off the ground,” Julius
said, turning back to the specs unrolled before him. “Just that little bit
more lift.”
“I know why they’re necessary,” Henry said. “I just think necessary
should be elegant as well, and if it’s not it means trouble later.”
Julius, without nameable expression, raised his eyes from the rolls
of specs to his brother.
“Might mean trouble later,” Henry said to him. “Possible trouble.
Often does.”
“Oh I don’t know,” Julius said. He sat back in his chair and felt for
the pipe in his vest pocket. “I remember Ader’s Avion back a long time
ago. That day at Satory. How elegant that was.”
“Yes,” Henry said. “The Avion.”
“Piss elegant,” said Julius. His lack of expression had not altered.
To the chief of engineering he said, “The Avion looked like a bat.
Exquisite. Even folded its wings back like one, to rest.” Julius made the
gesture. “Only trouble, it couldn’t fly.”
“Well I hate to tell you what this one looks like,” Henry said.
Julius turned then from the specs and gazed, deadpan, at the absurdly
elongated fuselage, with its swollen head and the two big ovals at its
root.
2
The day that Henry Van Damme and his brother had spoken of was
a day when Henry was twelve and Julius ten, a day in October of
1897, when following their tutor and their mother, young and
beautifully dressed and soon to die, they came out of the Gare
du Nord in Paris and got into a taxicab to be driven to a brand-new
hotel in the Rue St.-Philippe-du-Ruel (their father liked new hotels, as
he did motor cars and telephones). Waiting for them at the desk, as
they had hoped and expected, was a large stiff envelope, and the boys
insisted that their tutor immediately set up the gramophone that went
everywhere with them in its own leather box. Their mother had diffi-
culty even getting them out of their wool coats and hats before they sat
down in front of the machine. Jules was the one who cranked it up
with the slender Z-shaped crank of lacquered steel and ebony; Henry
(whose name was Hendryk in the Old World) was the one who slit the
seals of the envelope and drew out carefully the Berliner disc of cloudy
zinc. He knew he was not to touch the grooves of its surface but it