Over the years, Mrs. Grouse’s only complaint with the family physician, who attended their church and was middle-aisle usher, was that he lacked sufficient sternness. Another doctor might have frightened her husband into quitting smoking sooner, whereas Dr. Walters, she suspected, secretly sympathized with her husband’s backsliding. As a result, the entire burden had fallen on her. He never smoked in the house, but she suspected Mather Grouse of lighting up whenever he went outside to work in the garden or walk around the block “for exercise.” Mrs. Grouse faithfully reported her husband’s cheating, hoping that Dr. Walters could be induced to deliver a stiff lecture, but the more she detailed the lengths her husband would go to to sneak a cigarette, the more the old fool would smile and nod at her. And so Mrs. Grouse gradually took to sharing her husband’s previously solitary walks through Choir Park and to poking her head outside every few minutes when he was gardening, to make sure he was all right. Insuring that he was never alone was no easy task, because Mather Grouse was slippery where smoking was concerned, and Mrs. Grouse estimated that despite her vigilance, he probably managed at least four cigarettes a day.
All along it was Mrs. Grouse who had looked after her husband’s health, and for that reason she had no intention of allowing her daughter to claim credit for saving his life. They’d exchanged no words on the subject, but clearly Anne felt not even a twinge of remorse. And while her daughter would never dare say so, it was equally clear to Mrs. Grouse that Anne was critical of Mrs. Grouse’s calm, responsible posture in waiting patiently for the ambulance, just as she had been instructed to do. Actually, Mrs. Grouse was a little foggy about what she was told on the telephone when she had called the emergency number. But she was pretty certain that she had not been instructed to do anything and, as anyone could see, that was practically the same as being instructed to do nothing. She was assured that the ambulance would be right there and imagined the vehicle rounding the corner onto their street even as she hung up the phone. And while it took longer than she had anticipated, the white-jacketed medics who threw the oxygen mask over Mather Grouse’s mouth were responsible for her husband’s salvation. Or, if not the ambulance people, then she herself, who had calmly dialed the number and explained the situation and given the address without the slightest hysteria. Had she not practiced that drill every night for nearly three years, and responded with skill and courage? All her daughter had succeeded in doing was fracturing Mather Grouse’s jaw.
Now, with Mather in the hospital again, things were bitterly civil between Mrs. Grouse and Anne, who stayed strictly in the upstairs flat where she and Randall lived. They took turns visiting him and could not agree on his condition when they compared notes.
“I think he’s going to be just fine,” said Mrs. Grouse when her daughter stopped downstairs on her way to work.
“Not fine, Mother. Just out of immediate danger. Have you made arrangements for the oxygen yet?”
“That’s for your father to decide, dear,” Mrs. Grouse said, her lips thinning perceptibly, as they did whenever Anne stepped across the invisible line. “But I can tell you right now he won’t have one of those big tanks sitting in the middle of the room for everyone to see. He’s a proud man.”
“As long as he’s alive.”
Mrs. Grouse set her jaw firmly. “Don’t start worrying him as soon as he gets home. You know what upsets do to him.”
“I know what not being able to breathe does to him. I don’t understand what you have against the idea.”
“Me?” Mrs. Grouse pretended surprise, though she hated the prospect of an oxygen tank in the house. They were not only huge and ugly, but dangerous, too, or so Mrs. Grouse suspected. She knew the tanks were filled under enormous pressure, and she was unable to dispel from her imagination the possibility that the cap might come off one day and the tank fly around the room like a leaking balloon, bouncing off the walls, killing them all in the process before crashing through the front window and coming to rest in the middle of the street. “It hasn’t a thing in the world to do with me,” Mrs. Grouse said. “I just won’t have your father killed with all these upsets.”
Anne stopped at the door and turned to face her. “We both know what he’s going to die of, Mother.”
Confronted with this obvious truth, Mrs. Grouse did what worked best in such situations. She changed the subject. “I think I’ll have a pot roast for his first supper home. And banana cream pie for dessert.”
“Whatever,” Anne said. “Do you want me to pick anything up on the way home?”
“Like what?”
“Like a pot roast? Or bananas?”
“Don’t be silly. I’ll go right down to Howard’s.”
“I didn’t think I was being silly, Mother. I was offering to save you a trip.”
“What trip? Two itty-bitty blocks.”
“Fine.”
“I don’t like things from those big supermarkets anyway.”
Anne knew the best thing was to let her mother have her own way, since she’d end up doing as she pleased regardless. “Don’t plan on me,” she told Mrs. Grouse. “I’ve missed a lot of work and tomorrow’s Friday. I’ll probably have to stay late.”
“I think that’s terrible,” said Mrs. Grouse, who never missed an opportunity to suggest that Anne was ill-treated at work.
“I’ll tell my boss. He always looks forward to hearing your opinion.”
“Well, I mean really.…” Mrs. Grouse elaborated, “I never heard of such a thing.”
Anne resisted the impulse to tell her mother that there was a good deal she’d never heard of. Married to Mather Grouse at seventeen, she had never held a job outside the home she ruled as absolute mistress, whereas Anne, since her divorce, had been a professional woman and took pride in it, something Mrs. Grouse had no experience of. During the years Anne and Randall spent in New York, she and her mother remained at cross-purposes, Mrs. Grouse doling out advice in long letters to a daughter whose life was already broader and deeper by half.
“When Randall gets home, I want him to pick up his room. No heading off to the hospital until it’s done either. I’ll stop by the ward on the way home.” When Mrs. Grouse didn’t answer, Anne said, “Did you hear me, Mother?”
“Of course I heard you. I’m not deaf.”
“Goodbye, Mother.”
On her way Anne took the garbage pails to the curb and set them on the terrace. Mrs. Grouse called to her from the front window, “Did you put the handles up? The dogs—”
“Yes, Mother. I’m not a child.”
Her mother was still talking when Anne got in the car and closed the door on her voice. Instead of driving away, she sat where she was and massaged her throbbing temples with her fingertips. Then she checked her appearance in the rearview mirror, suspecting for some reason that she must look terrible. She didn’t, though. There were the lines beneath her eyes that had begun to appear shortly after her return to Mohawk two years before, but they had not deepened significantly. And besides, it wasn’t really age she feared.
Two doors down the block, staring at her curiously, stood a mangy-looking dog of indeterminate breed. Anne returned his gaze until the mutt became self-conscious and, panting, walked a tight circle. For some reason, staring the animal down cheered her up a little. When Anne backed out of the driveway, the dog’s ears perked and his wet tongue lolled out of his mouth. When she disappeared around the corner, the dog loped forward toward the garbage cans.
8
Dallas Younger’s life was place oriented, at least as far as it was oriented at all. At certain times of the day or week, only certain places would do, and if he happened to be anyplace else he was vaguely unhappy. He had started spending his Sunday mornings in his brother’s wife’s kitchen shortly after Loraine and David were married. He and Anne had recently split up, which made his Sundays seem pretty purposeless—the only day of the week when he felt any serious dissatisfaction with his life. On the Sabbath Dallas’s two-room apartment, small and
cramped and none too clean, always seemed to him small and cramped and none too clean. Only rarely did it seem that way on other days of the week, and when it did, he simply left. But on Sunday mornings Dallas’s haunts were all closed, and the men he drank and shot pool with felt obliged to stay home with their families, at least until the ballgame came on and the bars opened at noon.
Loraine’s kitchen, thick with the smell of fresh cinnamon rolls, was Sunday morning to Dallas Younger. Before his brother’s death, Dallas, who had a key, would be waiting in the kitchen when they returned from church. He would cheerfully accept Loraine’s chiding about being a heathen and David’s pretended anger over his treatment of the Sunday paper, which got rearranged, its pages mixed up and folded the wrong way before David even had a chance to look at it. To make matters worse, Dallas would read aloud from the sports page. Both men were avid fans, but David always saved the sports for last, dutifully reading the other sections thoroughly before allowing himself the pure pleasure of box scores. He’d done things that way all his life. As a boy he separated Oreo cookies, first eating the dry cracker shell, saving for last the sweet white filling. No one had ever succeeded in breaking him of that habit, not even his brother, who always swiped the hoarded filling, stuffed it in his mouth and grinned, his mouth open far enough to reveal the depth of his childish depravity. Dallas, of course, had eaten his cookies in reverse order, as he had begun every endeavor with the part he enjoyed most. The landscape of his life was littered with classified sections and dry cookie shells.
But since David’s death, Dallas had not been regular in his Sunday visits. Sometimes he didn’t wake up until noon, which meant that Sunday morning had taken care of itself. Other times he didn’t go over due to the vague feeling that Loraine wouldn’t really want him there. And he hadn’t been back since the morning he’d been confused about his niece’s birthday and only now, as he pulled up in front of his brother’s house, did he remember his promise to Loraine to keep an eye out for a job. He couldn’t remember having heard of anything, though, and he was grateful for that.
Loraine answered the door in her bathrobe again, looking surprised to see him or, maybe, anyone. “What’s the story,” Dallas asked. “It’s ten o’clock. How about getting dressed?”
“Thanks for the advice. For your information, I’ve been up all night with a sick child. Hundred and two fever.”
“How about me cheering her up?”
“Like hell. I just got her to sleep.”
“Oh,” Dallas said. He had wondered if he would end up sorry he came over, and sure enough he was. Loraine looked tired and grumpy, and there was no cinnamon-roll smell in the kitchen.
“Come on in, though. There’s coffee, and I could use a little cheering up myself.”
Dallas took his usual seat and immediately began to feel more comfortable. In the unlikely event that he ever owned a house, he would want it to be one like David and Loraine’s. It wasn’t that much of a house, really, but somehow it felt right. When coffee brewed, you could smell it everywhere in the house, and on holidays with a turkey in the oven you could feast on the aroma. Though today there were dishes stacked in the sink, several days’ worth, and it occurred to Dallas that his sister-in-law’s explanation for still being in her bathrobe might be a convenient excuse. She poured them each a cup of coffee. “The paper’s in the living room if you want it.”
“Maybe later.”
Loraine stirred some cream into her coffee. “I figured you must be mad at me for treating you so rotten.”
Dallas made a face. “You know better. I’ve been busy, is all.”
“I know how busy you get,” Loraine said. “That the same set of choppers you had before or different ones?”
“Don’t get smart. What’s wrong with Little One?”
“Flu, prob’ly.”
“Want me to take her to the doctor?”
“Where? It’s Sunday.”
“There’s the hospital.”
Loraine shook her head. “I’m not that scared yet. Besides, I can take care of her. What I need is someone to take care of me.”
“If it’s money.…”
She smiled. “No. What I need is a good hot beach someplace. Where I can lie in the sand and have somebody whose only job it is to bring me those tall native fruit drinks with miniature palm trees in ’em. He could also rub suntan oil on my back if he felt like it.”
Dallas was surprised by his sister-in-law’s mood and, for some reason, a little embarrassed by it.
“You don’t have to look at me like that,” Loraine said. “There was a time when the boys would have fought for the privilege of greasing me up.”
“What did I say?”
“Nothing. You’re too kind to say it.”
They drank their coffee, Dallas stirring his in order to appear occupied. Again it was clear to him that he shouldn’t have come, and he wondered if there was any way he could leave without offending. He hated not knowing what people were thinking. It happened mostly with women. When he married, he had never known what to make of Anne, whose moods were unpredictable and far too subtle for him to read accurately. He always laughed at the wrong times, thinking he was supposed to, and then got serious when she was trying to joke with him. It made him grateful that women didn’t play poker, because then he’d always be folding and raising at the wrong times, a problem he had anyway.
“Don’t you ever wish someone would take care of you?” Loraine said. “Cook you a meal? Iron you a shirt? Someone who’d always know where your teeth were?”
“Keep it up.”
She frowned. “That’s no answer.”
“No, then. I don’t want anyone to take care of me. I live the way I want.”
“That’s crazy. Nobody lives the way they want.”
“If you want to meet somebody new, get out of the house. Who’s going to come over here looking for you?”
“That’s just it. I’m not even sure I want to meet anybody. I hated dating, even as a teenager. All that being nice when you don’t feel like it. All the time wishing you were cleverer and better looking than you are. I haven’t got the stomach for it any more. I can’t even get up the nerve to look for a job.”
“I’ve talked to a couple people,” Dallas lied. “Something will turn up.” He made a mental note to really look around. He hated telling lies to people he liked, but maybe he would be able to find Loraine work. That would make up for it.
“Don’t use up any favors,” Loraine told him. “When push comes to shove, maybe I won’t have the guts.”
“What else can you do?”
“Sell the house, live off that for a while. After Dawn is grown up, I don’t care that much.”
As if on cue, the little girl cried out upstairs and Loraine started from the table.
“Want me to go up,” Dallas asked.
“Not really. All you know how to do is tickle.”
Alone, Dallas went into the living room and found the paper. He started with the sports section, which quickly absorbed his thoughts. It would’ve been nice to read out loud if there’d been somebody to read to. He would’ve liked to get his brother all red-faced just one more time. Subconsciously he lifted his bridge free of the roof of his mouth with his tongue, then let it slip back in again. He’d been without his own front teeth since he was nineteen, when he got into a fight and refused to give in, even after taking a terrible beating. The loss of his teeth didn’t bother him much, even at the time, but his brother David had unraveled. Coming to see Dallas in the hospital, David didn’t even recognize him at first. Dallas’s face was swollen and gray and, when he grinned at his younger brother, the boy had broken down. Years later, after his marriage to Loraine, Dallas could still unhinge his brother by removing his partial and grinning at him. Once David was so angry he made Dallas promise never to do it again. “They’re gone,” Dallas had told him. “I don’t see why that should bother you if it doesn’t bother me.” But after that he rarely removed his t
eeth in his brother’s company.
When Loraine came back downstairs, Dallas was completely absorbed by the college football line scores, and she studied him with interest from the foot of the stairs. Her late husband had been slight of build, his dark brown hair thinning badly after his twentieth birthday. Later, after the treatments, he was completely bald. Dallas’s hair was still thick and black, and he was sturdy at just under six feet. Anyone who didn’t know him might have mistaken Dallas’s thoughtful expression as he read the paper for profound intellect, and Loraine, who knew him well, couldn’t help wondering if her brother-in-law’s lunatic behavior might not mask a better mind than people gave him credit for. Everyone said his son Randall was very smart in school, and the boy must’ve inherited it from someone. Anne, perhaps, but maybe even Dallas. When people jokingly asked Dallas how he wound up with such a smart kid, Dallas explained by saying he’d had a smart milkman. In truth, Dallas himself was not convinced of his son’s intelligence.
He finally became aware of her. “Fever’s finally broken,” she told him. “She’d like to see you.”
He quickly rose and went to the foot of the narrow staircase. “Where’s my girl?”
From above there came a delighted peal of laughter.
9
Much to the delight of Mather Grouse, the autumn days stayed mild well into November. He felt like himself for the first time since early summer, and even the thought of the approaching winter and the bitter winds that would keep him housebound failed to dampen his spirits. Autumn had always been his favorite season, and in the afternoons he was able to take short walks without the cloth mask given him by Dr. Walters. The neighbors raked leaves and burned them in large drums, the sweet smell lingering in the neighborhood long after the leaves themselves had been reduced to white cinders. Mather Grouse enjoyed the scent of autumn because it reminded him of Keats’s ode, which in turn made him feel better about life than was his custom. After summer, which exhaled suntan oil on sweaty limbs, the scent of nature incinerated was reassuring.
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