“Say oughta, Gaff.”
“Can it!” Harry thunders, so loud that everybody including the policeman jumps. Harry’s normally red face is even redder, and he brandishes his long, thin spatula like a sword. To someone wandering in off the street, Harry would look more comic than menacing, but anyone wise and within striking distance of his spatula takes him seriously.
It’s the lawyer who breaks the tension. “You must have got married again last night. Always makes you pissy. I can have it annulled by noon unless it’s consummated.”
“Consummated? Harry?”
Everybody laughs, and Harry lowers his weapon. He doesn’t mind them kidding him, but he’s still angry. “He’s just a poor moron. Give him a break, can’t you?”
“Sure, Harry. We really oughta.”
When the men pay up and leave, Harry and Officer Gaffney have the place to themselves. It’s early still. The policeman reads the front page of the Republican while Harry dumps a small tub of home fries onto the grill. He probably won’t see Wild Bill again until Monday morning, and that’s just as well. Harry wonders where he goes, what he does with his days and nights. By the time the policeman puts the paper down, Harry’s fries are good and brown underneath, but they look cold and unappetizing. The cars that were out front are gone, except for the Mercury.
“This Murphy character a customer?”
Harry says he isn’t.
Officer Gaffney pays for his coffee and goes back outside. Harry can see him bend over the Merc to write a citation on the hood. Harry turns the home fries and looks around his diner. He hasn’t many regrets about his life, nor does he want a lot that he doesn’t have. The diner is just about right. He wishes now that he had scrambled Wild Bill some eggs in the sausage grease, but that’s the only regret he can think of.
2
“I think the house will be just fine,” Mrs. Grouse said when her daughter Anne turned the corner onto Oak. The older woman was still in her Sunday outfit, a belted, cream-color dress, the fabric of which she smoothed over her knees with gloved fingers. Mrs. Grouse disliked riding in automobiles and refused to do so except to attend church or visit her older sister Milly, which was, in fact, where she and her daughter were now headed.
Anne drew over to the curb. “Do you want to go back and check the house again, Mother?”
“Whatever for, dear?”
“I have no idea. But if you have doubts, let’s go back … by all means. Otherwise you’ll be wondering out loud all afternoon.”
“Nonsense.”
“I agree,” Anne said, pulling back onto the street.
When they had gone about a block, Mrs. Grouse said, “I locked all the doors.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Mrs. Grouse didn’t look at her daughter. “There isn’t a thing in the world for you to be upset about. But with your father in the hospital, the house happens to be my responsibility.”
Anne knew it was pointless to continue the conversation. Most things, great and small, fell under the general heading of her mother’s responsibility, and Mrs. Grouse shouldered them all bravely on her slender frame. The two women had been feuding since the attack that hospitalized Mather Grouse earlier in the week. Since then, they had alternated staying with him at the hospital, waging the same subtle war they’d been engaged in as long as Anne could remember. Not surprisingly, Mather Grouse seemed to prefer the company of his grandson Randall to either of them.
“Randy has the number …,” ventured Mrs. Grouse, who never in her life left a doubt unvoiced.
“Yes, Mother. Please, let’s not worry everything to death.”
“What are you talking about? I simply said—”
“I know what you said. But in a few minutes you’ll be with your sister and then you’ll forget about everything. You’ll forget that the house exists. In the meantime, can’t we have some peace?”
Milly was pushing eighty, nearly fifteen years older than Anne’s mother, but the two women were spiritual twins. They hadn’t been particularly close until the four sisters between them in age died. Since then, the two women began rewriting their pasts until both believed that they had spent every day of their girlhood in each other’s exclusive company, when in reality the decade and a half that separated their births had made them relative strangers. But they unburdened themselves of this constraining reality for the sake of the vivid, shared recollections that lacked even the slightest basis in fact. Old Milly took spells when she confused Mrs. Grouse with their sister Grace, dead the best part of twenty years. Fortunately, Mrs. Grouse had little trouble shifting gears, and she cheerfully assumed the dead sister’s identity lest she upset the living one. To Anne there was something a little spooky about her mother’s easy metempsychosis on such occasions, but she never said anything.
Of course the sisters shared some recent memories more firmly grounded in historical fact. It was Milly’s husband who had been responsible for Mather Grouse’s coming to Mohawk shortly after his marriage to Anne’s mother. The town had seemed alive and healthy then, though the leather business was already showing signs of decline that no one imagined would be permanent. All the tanneries and glove shops were hiring, at least seasonally, and Mather Grouse had gotten work in the same shop that employed Milly’s husband. When things began to go bad, everyone blamed the Depression and said things would boom again once the economy recovered. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, Mather Grouse enlisted, confident that he would return to the same job he left.
But the war changed everything. In order to escape high import duties the more unscrupulous shopowners began to bring into the country as unfinished goods gloves that required only the fastening of a single button to become “finished,” and in this way the demand for the skills of Mohawk’s cutters was controlled. Never again would there be more work than men, and competition for the existing work drove wages lower. Very few of the men knew what was happening to them, and those who did were afraid to speak out.
Still, the years following the war were not bad ones, at least for the two sisters. They were veteran “visitors” and took turns entertaining each other to pass the long afternoons when their daughters were in school and their husbands at the shop. Serving fancy pastries on lace doilies, they gossiped harmlessly, sticky fingered, on many subjects. Who among the cutters was getting the best leather, who was likely to get laid off if the work did not last through the winter, and the like. Both women had delivered their children very late in the natural scheme of things, and mothering did not come easy to either of them. Anne and her mother cared for each other after their fashion. But they were very different, and neither mother nor daughter had spoken of loving one another since Anne was a very small girl.
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 fau
lt 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.”
3
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 u
nder 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.
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