Mohawk

react. Instead, she ignored the men as if they didn’t exist, never so much as glancing upward in their direction. This left the boy utterly confounded. Did she as well expect him to behave in such a way? The horror proved too much. So he ran. With her books, until she called after him, and then without, having dropped them unceremoniously in the grass. Later, when his father taught him to forget, he was grateful.
    In the shop the festive atmosphere was slow to dissipate, but when it finally did the men were conscious of having misbehaved, though no one was prepared to admit it. One man asked when Mather Grouse expected to announce the banns, and everyone laughed nervously. During the entire episode, Mather Grouse, after looking out the window only once, had returned to his work. The skin along the back of his neck glowed bright red, but he had not uttered a word.
    Nor did he say anything at dinner that night, still too full of powerful emotion to react wisely. Strangely equidistant between grief and rage, he trusted neither. To put this humiliation behind him was not impossible, nor even that difficult in the long run. What he was unable to shake off was the new sense of his daughter, seated across the table from him, suddenly a vulnerable young woman. She had changed so quickly he had somehow failed to notice. Her girlishness had been so self-sufficient that he hadn’t worried, as if girlishness itself were a potent charm. Now the angular, little girlhad become softer, lovelier, weaker. She no longer seemed the equal of anything she was likely to encounter, and seeing her today, in the company of the son of the man who most embodied everything he wished his daughter to escape, had cut him adrift. What if, despite her great gifts, she also ended up trapped? Would she pity some poor boy and marry him, set up house in some rundown second floor flat to wait patiently for him to come home from Greenie’s, their meager meal sitting idly on the back burner? In another year would she be pregnant beneath her flowing graduation robes? In ten years would he, Mather Grouse, himself older, too old, climb the stairs to this rancid flat only to discover her finally gone, perhaps with the children, perhaps not?
    This particular evening, such a scenario did not seem melodramatic. For such was the basic plot of the Mohawk tragicomedy, staged again and again. Rory Gaffney’s own wife had tolerated him as long as she could, then one cold winter afternoon, with no luggage, had walked downtown to the Four Corners and climbed aboard the Greyhound to Syracuse and points unknown. Mather Grouse had never met the woman, but felt sure that he knew her. And as he studied his now mature daughter across the table, the other woman’s story became hers.
    To make matters worse, that night Mather Grouse dreamt about his daughter in a way that left him so angry and ashamed that he got up from bed and went into the bathroom where he cried quietly in the dark until he regained his composure. So it is me, too, he thought. In spirit I was among them today. Hanging out the window, shouting lewd, indecent things. I
am
no different. Neither beauty nor innocence nor thebest of intentions can alter that which has always been.
    So Mather Grouse thought in the dark. And then he thought, Maybe it isn’t true. She still is the same. Still innocent. And if I were to go into her room, I would find the same girl that I have tucked in every night since she was an infant. And if I were to do it now, I could banish for good the ugliness of my thoughts. Mather Grouse went to the door of his daughter’s bedroom, but did not enter. What if she were awake? he thought. What if she suspected his dream? It was as if father and daughter had grown up at the same moment.

27
    At two in the morning Mohawk is chilled and asleep. In the whole town not one person is abroad in the brittle night air. If anyone were awake indoors, he might detect the first snow of the winter gently dusting the town. By morning it will have disappeared, or remain only as frozen ice crystals on the sidewalks, and the small boys hoping to make a dollar before Christmas will be disappointed.
    The traffic light at the Four Corners clicks green, then yellow, then red. No car has passed beneath it in half an hour, and no one would be inconvenienced if the light didn’t change until five-thirty when the milk trucks begin their rounds. On weekdays no policemen are on duty once the bars close, though one