Mohawk (11 page)

Sunday mornings, when his wife goes to church, Mather Grouse often sleeps sitting up in his favorite armchair. The house is quiet then, and he has faith that he will not die on a Sunday. Sometimes he will turn on a television evangelist. It doesn’t matter greatly which one because Mather Grouse never turns up the volume far enough to hear distinctly what is being said. What he likes is the rhythm and, if it’s the right sort of sermon, he will not only sleep but actually breathe with the cadence. Often his “religious slumbers,” as he terms them, are the most peaceful time of his week.

Mather Grouse does not sleep much at night any more. Breathing is difficult when he lies down, and he often has nightmares in which his lungs don’t take in sufficient oxygen. Each night he spends many hours perched on the edge of the bed, thinking about smoking cigarettes and how nice it would be to be able to recline and breathe at the same time.

But come Sunday morning his old chair is perfect. Its arms have been worn threadbare by his elbows, but he will not let Mrs. Grouse put a slipcover over it unless company is coming, which—when he has anything to say about it—is seldom. He believes that sick old men should be left alone, except when they don’t want to
be, and he has managed over the years to be left alone. This morning Mrs. Grouse and Anne and Randall will visit the Woods after church. He has been left a plate of something in the refrigerator for when he is hungry, but he cannot imagine being hungry today. The medicine leaves a brassy taste in his mouth, and any more he eats out of duty, to avoid weakness. He nods sleepily, his chin coming to rest upon his breastbone, his bald spot staring at the smiling black-and-white evangelist.

Mather Grouse is asleep only a few minutes when the doorbell rings. He ignores it, not even bothering to open his eyes. Odd people sometimes come by on Sundays, wanting to discuss Scripture. They are far more likely to go away if you don’t answer the door than if you do and tell them to. Mather Grouse cannot remember if the blinds are drawn, but this doesn’t matter. If they look in, see an old man slumped forward in an armchair and fail to raise him with the bell, they will depart. Basically they just follow Scripture, and Scripture doesn’t have any advice about what to do in these situations. Soon he will hear the sound of their retreating footsteps.

When the bell rings again, Mather Grouse slyly opens one eye, just enough to see. A lone man is standing on the porch, but the blinds are half drawn and Mather Grouse cannot make out who it is. He can think of no one who has any business standing on his porch on a Sunday morning, but when the bell rings a third time, he pulls himself out of the chair and goes to the door where his old friend Dr. Walters is waiting patiently. “Are you going to invite me in, Mather?”

Mather Grouse decides not to, but he does pull open
the door and step out of the way. “You’re not in church,” he remarks.

“I don’t go as regularly as I used to,” the old doctor admits. “In fact I’ve been feeling particularly irreligious lately. I don’t suppose it’s good form for men our age to indulge in crises of faith, though.”

Mather Grouse has already returned to his armchair. “Men our age shouldn’t indulge in anything.”

Dr. Walters takes off his outer coat and folds it neatly over the arm of the sofa. If Mrs. Grouse were there, she would hang it up and offer him a cup of tea, but Mather Grouse’s inhospitality is legendary, even among his friends. “Any more I find myself a prey to young men’s doubts. I’ve come to suspect there’s something dark at the center. Don’t you find that silly?”

“No.”

“Neither do I, just now, but the feeling may pass. Still, I doubt you and I have ever been men of real faith. I much more enjoyed our friendly competitions than anything else about Sunday churchgoing.”

Mather Grouse smiles. As ushers, they always made tiny wagers on who would take in more in the collection basket. “You could always afford to make up the difference. My side was always dimes and quarters, the occasional dollar bill. A crisp new ten-spot always turned up in yours. If it hadn’t been for that, you’d never have won.”

“You were better at making people feel guilty. They saw you coming and dug into their pockets. They saw me and said, let
him
pay. Perhaps if you came back to church I’d get my religion back.”

Mather Grouse knows all this is leading somewhere. His friend is a master of indirection, but he will not
be able to conceal the purpose of his visit much longer. “It was you who insisted I give it up to begin with.”

“Yes,” the other man admits, but his voice is tentative.

“Besides,” Mather Grouse says, “I get all the religion I need right here.” The two friends smile and watch the evangelist, whose face is aglow with love and makeup.

“I have another patient with emphysema,” Dr. Walters ventures. “About your age, though according to the X-rays the damage to his lungs is far greater.”

Mather Grouse says nothing. The two men are not looking at each other. It is very close now, and Mather Grouse begins to suspect the direction they are heading.

“The man is a mover. He carries people’s furniture up and down flights of stairs. I told him this would have to stop. He has two big, strong sons. I said he’d have to let them do the heavy work.”

“Very good advice.”

“But you see what I’m driving at?”

“No,” Mather Grouse lied.

“Here, then. You are suffering from emphysema, a disease we’re only now learning about. We know it will gradually grow worse, because that’s the only thing it can do. Eventually, unless you get hit by a car in the meantime, it will take your life. This much we know. But for a long time I’ve suspected—and now I’m certain of it—that you are sicker than you should be. Your lungs have suffered some deterioration, and there’s the phlegm. But you should be able to breathe.”

“That’s very good to know. I promise to turn over a new leaf.”

Dr. Walters frowns. Mather Grouse has always been difficult. He is resisting, and the doctor won’t easily discover what he wants to know. If at all, perhaps. “Tell me about the bad days. When do they come?”

“Whenever,” Mather Grouse says. “Sometimes I’m feeling good, then all of a sudden the tightness. If I happen to be awake, I have time to prepare. If I’m asleep, sometimes there isn’t time.”

“Do you dream?”

“Not often. Sometimes I have the sensation of dreaming, but when I wake up I can never remember what about.”

“Tell me about the last attack.”

Mather Grouse is growing annoyed. “I was in the park, sitting on a bench. I shouldn’t have walked all that way.”

“Why did you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was Mrs. Grouse with you?”

“No.”

“What were you doing?”

Mather Grouse decides to tell the truth, which might throw his friend off the track. “I was smoking. It felt wonderful.”

“I see.”

“I doubt it,” Mather Grouse says. “I’ll never be able to convince you, but it’s not the cigarettes.”

Mather Grouse steals a look and is surprised to see the other man looking so alert. So intense that he’s nearly cross-eyed, the doctor is studying Mather Grouse as if he were something under a microscope. “I believe you,” he says. “I have another patient. A little girl with asthma. Her parents are going through a divorce. A
very ugly one. Her attacks coincide with her father’s visits.”

“My father is dead,” Mather Grouse says. “You are the only one who visits here.”

“Yes.” Dr. Walters leans back against the sofa and crosses one knee. “But what I want to know is what you think about. What you think about and dream about when the tightness comes. That’s what I want you to tell me, my friend.”

Anne Grouse never set eyes on Dan Wood until he came home from Korea. By then she and Dallas had been dating for nearly a year. Dan lacked Dallas’s good looks, but her first conscious thought, the afternoon they met at her cousin’s, was regret that she had so openly committed herself to Dallas, whose light suddenly seemed dim. Not that Dan was a show-off. On the contrary, he was Dallas in geometric reverse. Where Dallas was garrulous, Dan was reserved. All the girls thought Dallas the handsomest man they knew, and Anne felt certain they would find Dan Wood plain by comparison, yet he was the most attractive man she’d ever met. She doubted that any girl, including her cousin, would ever value him at anything near his worth. What she admired most was his self-assurance. He wasn’t always trying to say witty things, and when he did say them, he felt no need to repeat them for changing company.

Though she fought the feeling, Anne was jealous of her cousin’s good fortune, for Diana and Dan were a match from the beginning. They had known each other before he went overseas and, though they’d never dated, he began writing letters. Those letters amounted to a courtship, and by the time he returned it was to a
woman he’d never really known, except as she emerged through her responses on paper. If Dan was disappointed in Diana in the flesh, he showed no sign. For her part, Di was like the fairy-tale princess who waited, confident that every promise of future happiness would be redeemed in full, confident too that she would recognize the man she had waited for and that he would transform her. She had few physical charms, but when Dan came home from Korea, she simply opened her arms to him and in doing so became lovely in her own eyes and his.

For a long time Anne Grouse refused to admit that she was in love with her cousin’s fiancé. No one suspected. The two couples double-dated frequently, often at Anne’s suggestion, but despite their age difference, that seemed natural enough. There were times when Dallas would’ve preferred to have his girl all to himself, but when they were alone together, she was not as affectionate as he could’ve wished. She was far more agreeable, more willing to reciprocate affection, when they shared a cozy booth with Dan and Diana. Dan treated Dallas like a favored younger brother, humoring him, never showing him up, teaching him things without ever seeming to, providing Dallas with a social education as painless as osmosis. In turn, especially after drinking too much, Dallas was subject to flights of wild admiration for his new best friend. “
Helluva
guy,” he would say once he and Anne were alone.

“Yes.”

“One helluva guy,” he insisted, bleary-eyed, as if he had detected some implied reservation. “I want us all to be best friends. We should all four of us get married right away. Til’ death do us part.”

Many an evening would have ended in a fight over
an imagined insult had Dan not been present. Dallas was ambivalent about the fact that no matter where they went, Anne was likely to be the prettiest girl. He took great pleasure from the fact when the night was young and he was still relatively sober, but later the knowledge weighed heavily, especially when other young men intruded on their happy foursome, wanting Anne to dance. Dan often defused the situation by taking Anne onto the dance floor himself, the quarrel fizzling for lack of a prize. Though he drank as heavily as Dallas, Dan was older and accustomed to it; Dallas went out with the idea of getting tight, and succeeded by forced marches.

At the end of these evenings, back in her bedroom in her father’s house, the walls turning visible in the early morning light, Anne would try to hold onto the evening. But soon there was little but gray hopelessness. If things seemed fine when they were all together, when she was alone the fact that Dan belonged to her cousin, that they could not simply change partners, could not be ignored. To make matters worse, she had always been fond of Diana and genuinely pleased that the family prediction of spinsterdom would be foiled. If she was annoyed with her cousin at all, it was the result of a realization that came to Anne during the course of the summer—that Diana and Dan were actually lovers. At first she rejected the possibility as absurd. Diana had always been comically modest, not wanting to change into her swimsuit in front of other girls, failing to see the humor in dirty jokes. Moreover, she and Dan seldom showed the slightest public affection. Dallas always made sure he and Anne held hands, and often kissed her if he thought it was likely to be noticed. Though Dan and Diana were far more circumspect,
the more Anne observed them, the more subtle signs of intimacy she began to detect. For the longest time she was unable to think what Diana and Dan reminded her of, then it came to her: a married couple.

Ironically, Anne’s realization was compounded by a second intuition oddly out of synch with the first—that Dan Wood might have feelings for her. There never was anything overt between them, of course, and Dan never paid her any special attention, except when Dallas got too drunk to function, at which time Dan’s attentions would take on the air of dutiful friendship by holding a chair or offering an arm.

Dancing had always been one of Anne’s passions, and Diana, who danced indifferently, was always cheerful about lending Dan. Dallas danced like he did everything else, with wild enthusiasm and little staying power. The energy he put into a jitterbug often seemed comic, his arms and legs flailing about; with him for a partner, you danced at your own risk. In his rampant fits of dancing, his feet seldom firmly planted on the floor, fueled in part by drink but not quite drunk, he was always a threat to hurl Anne into tables of unsuspecting drinkers. Dan, on the other hand, moved effortlessly, always within himself, and he seemed as aware as Anne of the song’s nuances. Their signals to each other were neither false nor obvious.

As usual, Wild Bill Gaffney stopped at the Mohawk Grill at three in the afternoon. He never used the front door like the real customers, but came through the door that opened onto the alley. As always, he waited until the midafternoon dead time when Harry was alone. If there were customers, he waited patiently outside until they left. Then Harry would be glad to see him, at least after a fashion, and maybe even treat him to coffee without being asked. Today nobody was in the diner to make him uncomfortable, but Wild Bill discovered after climbing onto his stool at the end of the counter that it was impossible to appreciate his new winter coat indoors. Harry’s grill gave off enough heat to warm the whole place, and Wild Bill’s stool was right next to it.