Mohawk

deterioration, and there’s the phlegm. But you should be able to breathe.”
    “That’s very good to know. I promise to turn over a new leaf.”
    Dr. Walters frowns. Mather Grouse has always been difficult. He is resisting, and the doctor won’t easily discover what he wants to know. If at all, perhaps. “Tell me about the bad days. When do they come?”
    “Whenever,” Mather Grouse says. “Sometimes I’m feeling good, then all of a sudden the tightness. If I happen to be awake, I have time to prepare. If I’m asleep, sometimes there isn’t time.”
    “Do you dream?”
    “Not often. Sometimes I have the sensation of dreaming, but when I wake up I can never remember what about.”
    “Tell me about the last attack.”
    Mather Grouse is growing annoyed. “I was in the park, sitting on a bench. I shouldn’t have walked all that way.”
    “Why did you?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Was Mrs. Grouse with you?”
    “No.”
    “What were you doing?”
    Mather Grouse decides to tell the truth, which might throw his friend off the track. “I was smoking. It felt wonderful.”
    “I see.”
    “I doubt it,” Mather Grouse says. “I’ll never be able to convince you, but it’s not the cigarettes.”
    Mather Grouse steals a look and is surprised to see the other man looking so alert. So intense that he’s nearly cross-eyed, the doctor is studying Mather Grouse as if he were something under a microscope. “I believe you,” he says. “I have another patient. A little girl with asthma. Her parents are going through a divorce. Avery ugly one. Her attacks coincide with her father’s visits.”
    “My father is dead,” Mather Grouse says. “You are the only one who visits here.”
    “Yes.” Dr. Walters leans back against the sofa and crosses one knee. “But what I want to know is what you think about. What you think about and dream about when the tightness comes. That’s what I want you to tell me, my friend.”

13
    Anne Grouse never set eyes on Dan Wood until he came home from Korea. By then she and Dallas had been dating for nearly a year. Dan lacked Dallas’s good looks, but her first conscious thought, the afternoon they met at her cousin’s, was regret that she had so openly committed herself to Dallas, whose light suddenly seemed dim. Not that Dan was a show-off. On the contrary, he was Dallas in geometric reverse. Where Dallas was garrulous, Dan was reserved. All the girls thought Dallas the handsomest man they knew, and Anne felt certain they would find Dan Wood plain by comparison, yet he was the most attractive man she’d ever met. She doubted that any girl, including her cousin, would ever value him at anything near his worth. What she admired most was his self-assurance. He wasn’t always trying to say witty things, and when he did say them, he felt no need to repeat them for changing company.
    Though she fought the feeling, Anne was jealous of her cousin’s good fortune, for Diana and Dan were a match from the beginning. They had known each other before he went overseas and, though they’d never dated, he began writing letters. Those letters amounted to a courtship, and by the time he returned it was to awoman he’d never really known, except as she emerged through her responses on paper. If Dan was disappointed in Diana in the flesh, he showed no sign. For her part, Di was like the fairy-tale princess who waited, confident that every promise of future happiness would be redeemed in full, confident too that she would recognize the man she had waited for and that he would transform her. She had few physical charms, but when Dan came home from Korea, she simply opened her arms to him and in doing so became lovely in her own eyes and his.
    For a long time Anne Grouse refused to admit that she was in love with her cousin’s fiancé. No one suspected. The two couples double-dated frequently, often at Anne’s suggestion, but despite their age difference, that seemed natural enough. There were times when Dallas would’ve preferred to have his girl all to himself, but when they were alone together, she was not as affectionate as he could’ve wished. She was far more agreeable, more willing to reciprocate affection, when they shared a cozy booth with Dan and Diana. Dan treated Dallas like a favored younger brother, humoring him, never showing him up, teaching him things without ever seeming to, providing Dallas with a social education as painless as osmosis. In turn, especially after