Mohawk

“going together,” Billy Gaffney followed her home from school and stood across the street from the Grouse home as if awaiting a summons to dinner. Then something had happened to him—an automobile accident, people said—and he never recovered.
    Having put his foot down about Billy Gaffney, Mather Grouse was reluctant to register another serious objection, though he never disguised his opinion that Anne wouldn’t take long to discover on her own Dallas Younger’s limitations. Ironically, the limitation she spotted almost immediately was Dallas’s lack of worldly experience, for he turned out to be nearly as shy and inept as Billy Gaffney.
    Dallas had some limited experience of girls, but none of “nice” girls, and no idea of how to treat a girl too pretty and well mannered to be comfortable with. They’d had several dates before Dallas brushed her lips with his. That quick, terrifying touch, the smell of her scented breath, convinced Dallas that life was deep down good. It convinced Anne that it must’ve been someone else who knocked up Mary Sue Bergen. The realization wasstunning. After all, Dallas was known to hang around the pool hall, and he freely admitted to losing significant sums of money in poker games.
    Innocence aside, there was much to admire. Dallas was independent, had a place and a car of his own, and wouldn’t even have returned for his senior year if it hadn’t been for baseball. He held down an afternoon job at a local garage and never seemed to want for ready cash. There was even something romantic about Dallas in his work clothes, which made him look more like a man than a boy. Anne sometimes would wet a tissue with her tongue and remove a smudge from his cheek, an act that seemed to both of them entirely wanton and exciting.
    To say that Dallas “had a car” was somewhat misleading, because most of the time it was spread out all over the garage floor. No matter how you looked at a car, any car, it was impressive, but for Dallas perhaps the best way of looking was to lay all of its parts flat out there where you could see the full extent of your investment. On those occasions when he assembled the pieces, his car always ran, and on weekends he never had to ask his father for the keys to the family car. To Anne, Dallas was a sort of person she hadn’t ever known, as well as an exciting contrast to her father. Each day Mather Grouse faithfully went to the shop, just as he had since Anne was a little girl, having acquired in all those years nothing except emphysema. In the autumn her mother would stock the pantry with canned goods in case his work did not last the winter. They had nothing but a small savings account, not even a family car.
    There was a time when things looked as if they might improve, but it was brief. Mr. Grouse had been promotedto foreman at the shop, which meant not only more money but also a guaranteed winter. After a month, however, he went back to being a simple cutter. He had stepped down by choice; he told Mrs. Grouse that there was too much politics in the job and that he disliked wielding authority over men he had worked side by side with for so long. But for the first time in her life, Anne suspected her father of not telling the complete truth. A man he disliked was promoted to take his place, and the Grouses’ new-found prosperity and security was over.
    So, when Mather Grouse insinuated that Dallas lacked ambition, Anne had smiled bitterly to herself. It was true that Dallas had little interest in any of the things her father valued, but at eighteen the boy already had a place of his own and a car to boot. She didn’t question her father’s reverence for learning, his moral uprightness or his desire for more out of life than enough money to play the daily number and get drunk on weekends. But even measured by his own yardstick, Mather Grouse hardly seemed a success. And Dallas, feckless though he was, had more to show for his efforts—and a lot more fun than her father, for whom, it seemed to Anne, life was little more than a succession of sacrifices without even a slender promise of reward.
    Anne Grouse, then seventeen, also feared that the world outside Mohawk County—the better life that for Mather Grouse was the promise of education and hard work—was naturally reluctant to embrace those who were not born into it. Her suspicions on this score derived from her reading and from a day at Saratoga with Dallas. She could tell when he picked her up