Mohawk

being wild, which she had done little to discourage and nothing to merit. More than anything, she feared that if she did not do something to authenticate her reputation soon, she’d risk losing it. To contemplate the depth and breadth of her innocence was far more frightening than any fear of pregnancy. Mrs. Grouse had shared no wisdom with herand her father was not the sort of man a young girl with questions felt comfortable approaching. Anne knew little more than that with boys came the danger of conception, and that with boys like Dallas Younger the danger was multiplied.
    There was also the danger of destroying her father’s dream—that she would win a scholarship to the state university. No one in his own or his wife’s family had ever been to college. A man with eight grades’ worth of education himself, Mather Grouse had spent the better part of his adult life doing what he called “improving his mind.” His readings were eclectic, if wholly undisciplined, and by the time he was thirty, he knew a great deal without even beginning to satisfy his curiosity or discover its source. And he knew too that while he had read more than a great many educated men, the fact remained that they were educated and he was not.
    From the beginning, Anne had shared her father’s reverence for books, and he treated her to Saturday afternoons at the Mohawk Free Library the way other Mohawk fathers treated their offspring to movie matinees. By her sophomore year in high school, Anne was reading restless books that he himself would not have selected for her, and he had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all.
    On the subject of boys, however, Mather Grouse was a stern lawgiver, reminding his daughter repeatedly that her future hinged on her ability to keep from falling in love with some local boy long on promises and short on ambition. “There is no disparity,” he wasfond of quoting from
David Copperfield
, “in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.” He didn’t tell her that she was better than her classmates—just that it was unlikely she would meet anyone in Mohawk who wanted out of life what she wanted, or rather what her father wanted for her and trusted that in the end she would want for herself.
    In the matter of boys in general and Dallas Younger in particular, it was odd that Anne for the first time in her life discovered an ally in her mother. Mrs. Grouse, who would not have said so openly, did not share her husband’s ambitions for their daughter, partly because she feared a destiny far worse for the strong-willed Anne than the possibility of settling down to a responsible, dutiful existence like her own. And duty, that virtue she had tried to inculcate in her daughter above all others, would surely be driven home by necessity—the demands of a husband and children and a home. To Mrs. Grouse, her husband’s efforts to raise his daughter’s level of expectation had succeeded only in making her more vain and proud than she was by nature. The girl became more difficult by the hour, to the point of questioning the way her mother did things and demanding to know the reasons, openly expressing doubts that there were any.
    Under normal conditions, even with his wife and daughter in cahoots, Mather Grouse would never have permitted Anne to date a boy like Dallas Younger. But as it happened, Mr. Grouse had recently averted what he considered a far greater threat to his daughter’s well-being. Anne never understood her father’s horror at seeing her on the street in the company of Billy Gaffney, a quiet boy who’d had a crush on her for several semesters. One afternoon the boy had finally summonedthe courage to approach her, only to discover himself dumbstruck. Unable to ask for the privilege of carrying her books, he had finally, in utter desperation, yanked them away and refused to look at her as they walked, responding subverbally to her small talk.
    That her father should explicitly forbid her to associate with the Gaffney boy, surely the most harmless of classmates, made little sense to Anne, but she had never seen Mather Grouse more adamant. Normally she wouldn’t have given in, but giving up Billy Gaffney was a little like giving up liver for Lent. She felt sorry for him. Even once it was widely known that she and Dallas Younger were