Mohawk (3 page)

Milly, since her husband’s death over a decade ago, lived with her daughter and son-in-law on Kings Road, in one of the few remaining neighborhoods in Mohawk that had not seen better days, where there was some real money. Though it was in the same end of town as the Grouse home on Mountain Avenue, the latter neighborhood was beginning to exhibit, in chipped paint and rolling, cracked sidewalks, signs of the town’s general decline. On tree-lined Kings Road the earth never shifted, and the smooth, wide sidewalks ran straight and true. The houses themselves were set far back off the street, each home with its own manicured lawn and tall, symmetrical hedges. Despite frequent visits, Anne could never remember seeing anyone in the act of mowing or clipping. The seventh, eighth, and ninth holes of the Mohawk Country Club doglegged lazily around these homes on Kings Road, a dead-end street whose residents’ lives were punctuated by worries no more serious than the occasional slice or duck-hook. When Anne pulled into the driveway and stepped out, she heard the distant crack of a fairway wood and the mild curse of a man with a monied voice.

Diana Wood, Anne’s cousin, met them at the door,
her mother limping up behind. Old Milly and Mrs. Grouse greeted one another as if they had endured a separation of many months instead of two weeks. That they did not see each other daily was the fault of “the young people.” Di Wood looked ragged and tired, and after witnessing the too-fervent reunion of the sisters, she exchanged with Anne the look of a fellow sufferer. “How’s Uncle Mather,” she asked when they were out of earshot of the kitchen.

“They’re talking about releasing him tomorrow.”

“We’ve been meaning to visit, but things are never easy to coordinate around here. Any other time Mother would already be there.”

“Dad doesn’t expect it. He doesn’t appreciate visitors there any more than he does at home. Besides, you look beat.”

From the kitchen they were able to see into the living room where the sisters sat facing each other on the love seat, their knees actually touching. Di Wood shook her head. “We’ll be dead long before they will,” she said half seriously. “You ought to get out while you can. You’re still young enough.”

Anne smiled at the observation. “I’ll be thirty-five in a few short months. Which means that unless you’ve gained ground you’ll only be forty.”

Her cousin took a glazed ham out of the refrigerator and set it on the cutting board. It was very beautiful, topped with cherries and pineapple slices. The Woods always entertained Anne and her mother lavishly on Sunday afternoons. There was always a ham or roast or leg of lamb, along with several fancy salads. Since there was no way to reciprocate in kind, Anne wished her cousin wouldn’t go to the trouble. Milly was more or less housebound since fracturing her hip the previous
winter. But Di claimed to derive pleasure from “doing.”

“Look at me if you don’t think I’ve gained ground,” she said cheerfully.

This much was true. Diana had never been a pretty girl, though during her early twenties, shortly after her marriage to Dan, she had possessed a fragile, vulnerable loveliness that people often remarked on after regretting the plainness of her features. Now she could easily pass for fifty and her former fragility was supplanted by a kind of solidness. She looked like a woman who had spent her whole life waiting in line.

“What you and Dan need is to get out,” Anne said, as much to change the subject as anything. “Your mother could certainly survive a weekend. Mother and I could look in.”

Diana’s electric knife curled thin, admirable slices off the ham, each falling obediently on top of the last. “We were supposed to go away last weekend. We even hired a nurse. But when mother got wind of it she threw such a tantrum we didn’t dare go.”

“You should’ve anyway.”

“I know,” Diana conceded. “But after a while you lack the necessary will. It would’ve been just a gesture anyway. We wouldn’t have enjoyed ourselves.”

In the living room Mrs. Grouse and Milly had not moved. Their knees still touching, they faced each other, their eyes widening at the exchange of trivial information. Neither heard very well, and together they were too intent on each other to suspect that they were the topic of conversation in the next room. “Look at them,” Di smiled. “It’s as if they didn’t need another thing in the world.”

Anne would have liked to share her cousin’s sympathy
and generosity, but it wasn’t easy. She found little to pity in strength, and old Milly, though physically feeble, was capable by sheer force of will to have things pretty much her own way. Anne’s mother shared the family trait of passive aggression and determination. When Anne studied her mother she felt certain that the American wilderness had not been subdued by courageous men, but by their indomitable, sturdy wives—tamed by an attitude, a certain slant of the jaw, expressed only in the female, a quality she herself sadly lacked.

Di arranged the sliced ham on a large platter garnished about the edges with generous sprigs of fresh parsley. “They’re lucky when you think about it,” she said. “Everybody should have at least one other person in the world who is all her own. Someone she doesn’t have to share.”

Now it seemed to Anne that the same old thing was between them again, the way it often seemed to be, though Anne was never quite sure it was real. Just when she began to feel an almost painful intimacy with her cousin, she would become aware of its presence, as if each was able to read the other’s thoughts and unwilling to indulge intimacy too far. “I wish you’d let me do something. To help.”

Di looked around the kitchen as if for a task and, though there must have been many, came up empty. “Why don’t you go say hi to Dan. He heard the car pull up, and he’ll think you’re ignoring him.”

“Do you really suppose men suffer such insecurities?”

Di smiled sadly, and Anne felt the same twinge of intimacy again. “They claim to.”

“I thought maybe it was just us.”

Dan Wood was on the far side of the pool skimming leaves when he heard the sliding patio door and looked up. It did not look to Anne like he was making much progress. The wind was up and the brittle autumn leaves seemed attracted to the placid surface of the water. Even with the long-handled skimmer, the middle of the pool was well beyond Dan’s reach from the wheelchair, and the multicolored leaves lay there several layers thick, like a bright counterpane on a rippling waterbed. “Judging from the look on your face,” Dan said, smiling, “you’re about to tell me that I’m losing this particular battle with nature.”

“Why do you bother?”

“The goddamn filter will croak,” he said. It was a matter of intimacy between them that Dan swore. Diana did not appreciate profanity, and such language confirmed for old Milly the many doubts about her son-in-law that she had freely voiced during the last twenty-or-so years, the majority of them under his roof. Dan’s oaths were always quiet and reverent, though, and he never swore when he was genuinely angry, at which times he became peculiarly restrained.

He offered no objection when Anne relieved him of the skimmer and began working on the carpet in
the center of the pool, which she herself was barely able to reach by leaning. For a while he would be content to watch her work. “If I had my way, I’d just fill the bastard with cement and be done with it. Who needs the aggravation?”

“Di never uses the pool?”

“Occasionally,” he said, as if this concession did not exactly invalidate his point. “I should’ve drained it in September. I must’ve been thinking about Indian summer.” Wheeling over to do the deep end, he extracted a plastic lawn bag from a box sitting on the diving board. “The two of them going at it in there?”

“Nose to nose.”

“They’ll be good for the afternoon. How’s Mather?”

“Anxious to be released.”

“Legend has it you acted heroically.”

Anne banged some clinging leaves off the skimmer and onto the deck. “Talk to my mother if you’d like a balancing view.”

She had come home from work and found her father half dead. Though it was the second week in October, it was so hot the tar glistened on the roads the way it did in July and August. Mather Grouse had collapsed over his chair, the one he leaned forward onto when he needed to catch his breath, and then slumped to the floor where he lay precariously balanced against the wall, one leg beneath him, the other straight out as if in a cast. He was shirtless in the heat, the skin along his shoulders pale and translucent. When Anne came in, he was staring at nothing in particular, his eyes wide with fear, an expression his daughter had never seen in them before and that made him look like someone she didn’t know. His inhaler lay a few inches from where his hand twitched, and he pulled at the air in
short, quick gasps, the oxygen stopping far short of his straining lungs. He might as well have been under water.

Mrs. Grouse had been there in the living room, too, standing stiff with fright, several feet from where her husband lay. When Anne came in, she merely nodded toward Mather Grouse. The only thing that needed saying she said several times. “The ambulance is on its way. Everything’s going to be
just
fine … 
just
fine. The ambulance.…”

Kneeling beside her father, Anne tried to get his attention. Mather Grouse’s eyes refused to focus behind their fluttering lids, and his chest leapt under the force of each convulsive breath. His mouth opened wide, then snapped shut again, like a child’s toy, against his rising chest. When Anne picked up the inhaler and inserted it into her father’s mouth, Mrs. Grouse recoiled in horror. “No!” she cried. “You’ll burn his lungs. The men … they’ll be
right
here—”

“He can’t breathe, Mother. He’s dying.” Her father’s chest heaved angrily, as if in response to the word.

“The men.…”

Ignoring her mother, Anne timed Mather Grouse’s gasps, which were growing more and more feeble. She depressed the inhaler twice, just a few seconds apart. At first her father showed no sign, but then his eyes, which had begun to roll back, registered something. Pulling him away from the wall, she tried to get him on all fours, the position he once confessed was easiest for him to breathe in. She had caught him that way once, on his hands and knees, his head hung low, and he had been so embarrassed that he vowed never to assume that position again, preferring, as he put it, to strangle like a man than become an animal. But when Anne pulled up on his belt and the seat of his pants,
he seemed to understand and even tried to help by pushing up with his forearms. He managed one decent breath before the strength went out of his limbs and he drove forward, chin first, into the carpet.

“Help me!” Anne ordered her mother, who was watching from across the room, having backed away until she finally came up flush against the wall. Mrs. Grouse balked, but then did as she was told. For a terrible moment, once they had succeeded in getting him to his knees again, Anne was afraid her mother had been right, for her father appeared to stop breathing altogether and there was a dreadful rattle in his chest. Then he began to choke, expelling yellow bile from his lungs. But he also caught his first real breath, one that went all the way down, and he hung onto it like a drowning man. By the time the ambulance arrived, some of the icy blue had begun to drain from his cheeks. In the interim he had not objected to remaining on all fours, apparently grateful, at least for the moment, simply to be. Even as an animal.

“So,” Anne said, picking a particularly bright leaf off the skimmer, “I’m in the doghouse.”

Dan Wood, who had listened to the story somewhat abstractedly, began stuffing the soggy leaves into the bag with a large scoop. “I’d like to sympathize, but you’re old enough to know better than to disobey your mother. Just who did you think you were, saving your old man’s life after you’d been expressly forbidden to?”

“But I didn’t save his life, you see. The ambulance men get credit for that. What I get credit for is fracturing his jaw.”

“Ah.”

There were still plenty of leaves to skim, but Anne suddenly collapsed into a deck chair, letting the skimmer
balance against one knee. “It’s funny,” she said. “When I was younger and things first started going wrong between my father and me, I had this daydream where I would rescue him from a burning house. I knew it was silly, but I indulged the fantasy all the time. He would be unconscious and I’d have to drag him out through the flames. Lord knows where Mother was when all this rescuing was going on.”

“Dead, according to Freud.”

“Oh, stop it.”

Dan ducked the swatch of leaves she threw at him.

“Anyhow, it turns out I got my wish. And do you know what I did when I saw him in the hospital the next morning? I apologized for fracturing his jaw.”

“And so you’re ticked off at your mother.”

Anne studied him, surprised by his tone, but he did not meet her eye. “What’s your point?”

“No point. I just wondered about Mather’s opinion of the whole episode.”

“He’s got a fractured jaw, remember?”

“Mmmm,” Dan said. “You should get one of those drawing boards they have for kids. The kind you write a message on and then pull up the plastic sheet and the whole thing disappears. T-H-A-N-K-S, then zip—clean slate.”

Anne glared at him until he apologized, then added, “Don’t go telling me things if you don’t want my goddamn opinion.”

She did regret telling him. She might’ve guessed what his reaction would be. “It’s another of my idle dreams that you two will like each other one day.”

They were talking directly to one another now, not looking away. “That’s like me dreaming about walking again.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Only everything.”

“I don’t see why you and my father shouldn’t like each other. You’re a lot alike, when you think about it. For instance, you’re the two most bullheaded men I know.”

“Excepting Dallas.”

“Naturally,” she admitted. Her ex-husband. “Always excepting Dallas.”

“Well,” Dan smiled. “I don’t much appreciate being called bullheaded. And I don’t like your father. Never have liked him, never will like him. And there’s nothing you can do to change my mind.”