“But they made us sick, Rory Gaffney,” Mr. Anadio pleaded. “They didn’t have no right to make us sick.”
Gaffney put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m not sick, Mr. Anadio. I worked in the shops all my life. And look at our friend Mather Grouse here. He’s a different kind of sick, but you don’t hear him running down the shops that gave him a living. Mather Grouse is a man who keeps his peace. If I was sick, I’d thank the shops anyway. Where would men like us have been without work? We’re all of us the same, men like us.”
Mr. Anadio had lost interest in the dispute. He was too intent on fighting back the tears. He wished he could stop crying, but he couldn’t. “No kee-mo,” he said to Mather Grouse, his voice suddenly full of defiance. As far as he was concerned Rory Gaffney was no longer there. “I told ’em, too. Not me, I said.”
“I’m very sorry, Mr. Anadio,” Mather Grouse said.
“Not me,” the little man insisted. “I told ’em, too.”
“You should let the doctors cure you,” Gaffney said.
Mr. Anadio spit. “Cure! Not me, Mather. Maybe I’m sick, but no kee-mo. I even told young Tucker that.”
Then Mr. Anadio turned and walked out into the early evening. He left Mather Grouse weak and sick to his stomach, as if he had just given blood. “I had better go home,” he muttered. Mr. Anadio’s troubles had somehow made clear to him that he wouldn’t say what he had come to say. It was the boy’s courage he had felt, not his own. Men in their sixties did not make new beginnings.
“Yes, Mather, home,” Rory Gaffney said. “That’s the place.”
Untemeyer watched Rory Gaffney and Mather Grouse thoughtfully from the other end of the bar. His work for the day was finished and with money and slips safely tucked away in his deep pockets, he indulged himself with a boilermaker, as he did every day when Greenie’s emptied out. Once the two men were safely out the door, he and Woody the bartender would have the place to themselves. A strange pair, Untemeyer thought, as Rory Gaffney took Mather Grouse’s arm and steadied him toward the door. Then he remembered a strange story Dallas Younger had told him on the QT. If he remembered right, Mather Grouse had appeared one afternoon at the garage where Dallas worked and thrust twenty-five dollars into Dallas’s jacket along with instructions to buy a heavy winter jacket for, of all people, Wild Bill Gaffney. Give it to him yourself, Dallas had suggested. No, you, Mather Grouse had insisted, and to sweeten the pot he said that if Dallas did this one favor and never let on to anyone, he would consider Dallas’s debt squared. A strange story, Untemeyer thought. Maybe even true, and stranger still.
The door swung shut behind the two men, and Mr. Untemeyer grunted, downing his whiskey. Strange indeed. Somehow he had the impression that Mather Grouse and Rory Gaffney might even be blood enemies. But then life was strange, it occurred to him, as it did every afternoon at Greenie’s as he drank his boilermaker and looked to the silent Woody for companionship.
26
That men who don’t make friends easily seldom have any trouble making enemies is perhaps ironic, at least in the sense that intimacy is at the core of both relationships. In the leather shops where Mather Grouse worked, he had no friends, though with the majority of his fellow workers he was on congenial terms. Even so, they had cause to be suspicious of him—the way he went directly home after work each day, never playing a number or double when Untemeyer came around in the afternoon, never getting into the baseball pool, which cost only fifty cents, no matter how much money had accumulated when no one had won it for weeks on end. He never spoke up at shop meetings, though everyone else griped. And there was plenty to gripe about. Low wages, the poor quality of the leather, the seasonal layoffs, widespread rumors that some of the shops were going to close. Many speculated that before long the cutters would not be needed at all. In these meetings nothing was ever resolved, but everyone had the opportunity to blow off steam and went home happier for having voiced their opinions in a free country. Mr. Maroni, a wizened Italian who had worked leather for fifty years, always had the last word, and it was always the same. “Mr. Chair!” he would cry, his small voice all but lost in the shouting, until the noise finally subsided and he was recognized. “Mr. Chair! I wanna say wonna thing about the peep. You no can satisfax ever one. Ever one make a mistake. I am too.”
Since Mather Grouse sat almost apart from these proceedings, he was not to be trusted. Some whispered that he might be an informer, working for the owners, a thesis that would have gained more currency had it not been for the fact that Mather Grouse prospered less than any man present, routinely getting the worst leather to cut, expert and diligent as he was at working around the flaws, carefully, methodically, unwilling to give in to them. The men were paid according to the number of skins they cut, and while Mather Grouse was universally considered one of the finest cutters in Mohawk, come Friday afternoon his pay in no way reflected his talents.
Mather Grouse and Rory Gaffney had little enough to do with each other until the former, much to the surprise of everyone in the shop, was suddenly promoted to foreman when the man he replaced was discovered stealing leather and fled town before he could be arrested. Mather Grouse had hardly assumed his new duties when Rory Gaffney followed him into the washroom one afternoon. Nothing would be required of him. He would simply look the other way. Skins were always disappearing, and had been disappearing for so long that if they stopped disappearing it would be noticed and then a lot of people would be in trouble. Besides, the owners were the biggest crooks of all, only for them it was all legit. That’s the way it was in America. The owners saw to it that the workers remained poor and desperate. Why did Mather Grouse suppose they allowed and even encouraged Untemeyer to come around during working hours? Why did they promote Mohawk as the leather capital of the world and encourage new workers to settle there when everyone knew there wasn’t enough work to go around as it was? They paved the swimming pools in their back yards with the sweat and dedication of men like Mather Grouse. This was his chance to get even, at least a little.
“What about the others?” he had objected. “What about Mr. Maroni?”
Rory Gaffney shrugged. “Like the old guy says, ‘You can’t satisfax all the peep.’ ”
And so Mather Grouse had contrived an excuse to return to his old job and, when the bad season came, was laid off like Mr. Maroni and the rest. He never told anyone, not even Mrs. Grouse, partly because the situation was ethically complex. Though he considered himself an honest man, Mather Grouse knew that in the last analysis he had been no less appalled by the dishonesty of Rory Gaffney’s proposal than by the notion of throwing in with a man whose fingernails, though always cut obscenely close to the quick, were black. Gaffney was the sort of man he had always held in utter contempt—crude and vulgar and unapologetic. A man who smelled of his own fermented sweat and sperm and wanted no more out of life than what he already possessed. Only more of the same and more regularly.
Two men could not be more different. Mather Grouse never thought of himself in terms of his profession. Not that he harbored dreams of grandeur, though there was a time when he had dreamed. But necessity had made a realist of him, and he learned quickly that to be anything more than a simple leather cutter he needed either luck or daring. But he was conservative by nature, and luck was seldom a factor for those who didn’t choose to roll the dice. Actually, he had nothing against being a leather cutter. He had mastered his craft and derived considerable satisfaction from it. Nevertheless, he realized that even if he lived to be a hundred, he would be essentially the same person doing the same tasks, neither better nor worse. He wasn’t jealous of those who had more money than he did, though to have more money would’ve been nice. But it was change he longed for, and he often thought that in an ideal world people would change their personalities every decade or so, possibly learning something to boot. Each metamorphosis would necessarily be a change for the better. No butterfly, no matter how faded or imperfect, was ever uglier than the larva it emerged from
.
Mather Grouse was not naive, of course. He knew that most people who had enough money to embrace sweet change were sidetracked before they got around to changing much of anything. They changed their wardrobes, or rotated their tires. But no beautiful butterfly was ever formed. Still, young Mather Grouse concluded that this was their own fault. The opportunity existed, even if most chose to ignore it.
For men like himself, though, destiny was rigid. The cards had been dealt and the only choice was to play them well or badly. He himself chose to play them well but was never able to stifle the regret of the deal, of not being able to play all the hands around the table. He didn’t despise men who held winning hands, but he did object to men who held cards not all that different from his own yet were too stupid or crude to feel regret. They saw nothing wrong with the lives they led. They did not notice the film beneath their fingernails or, if they did, found it charming. Good manly grime. They noticed only its absence in other men, and were suspicious. They discussed their members proudly, explaining where they’d been and where they planned to go next. Gave them nicknames.
The low sameness of life gnawed at Mather Grouse like a sharp-toothed rodent, and dictated, even when he was young, that his only pride in life would derive from taking the less traveled path. And so he went home after work when he would’ve preferred a cold glass of beer. He stayed clear of gambling, though he would’ve loved to take part. He held his tongue and kept to himself, because to do things any other way was not so much wrong as self-defeating and common.
Long after he had quietly surrendered his personal dream, Mather Grouse continued to dream for his daughter. At the risk of turning her into a snob, he began to suggest to Anne that there was more to life than Mohawk had to offer. This message was not easily conveyed, however, especially with Mrs. Grouse undercutting her husband’s efforts with her own brand of stoic resignation. But Anne was bright and very beautiful, even as a child, her skin radiant and slightly darker than either parent’s, her eyes darker still, her hair so black it threw off an almost blue sheen. To her father she was so lovely, so true, that he convinced himself that she existed on a plane that transcended ordinary destiny. She was one of the lucky ones exempted from fate, a child with unearthly defenses all her own. One such defense was a stubborness of will equal, if not superior, to her mother’s. Anne also possessed uncompromising honesty and a hatred of injustice that made her eyes leap with fire. Mather Grouse loved her so deeply that he was almost beside himself with pride and hope.
But his cherished faith that Anne would somehow prove exempt from common fate was tested during her junior year, when it occurred to Mather Grouse that what he had viewed as her natural defenses against the crudeness of Mohawk County might under different circumstances become tragic flaws. And he suspected that she might be more cruelly vulnerable than he himself had ever been. Her recklessness, which would have terrified many a father, gave him little cause for alarm. Mather Grouse understood that such spirit would frighten the sons of Mohawk who, while as ready and willing as their fathers to plant their seed in any convenient place, would blanch at the notion of approaching Mather Grouse’s daughter. Whatever stoked the fire in her eyes made them timid, as her beauty made them unsure of themselves. They would slink up the back stairs of dark three-family houses to relieve themselves in the loins of some lonely, middle-aged woman of reputation, but like their fathers they lacked courage and will, not to mention intelligence.
No, Mather Grouse’s fears were of an entirely different cast. Anne was far too intelligent to be lastingly intrigued by these Mohawk boys. Her mind was not the problem—but what of the heart? Beneath her almost cruel beauty, she had little of the innate haughtiness that might’ve served as a shield, leaving her heart all too approachable. Instead of revulsion, she often felt sympathy, and unfairness always melted her. Her father’s fear on this score came to be personified in young Billy Gaffney.
The other men in the shop knew nothing of what had taken place between Rory Gaffney and Mather Grouse. The latter sometimes wondered what side they would’ve taken had they known, or even if they would’ve believed. Only the shrewdest saw what finally was plain—that Rory Gaffney prospered out of all proportion to his co-workers. Somehow he always got the best leather to cut, while the other men spent more time concealing the flaws in theirs. They might’ve resented Rory Gaffney had he ever given any indication he considered himself superior in any way, for democratic assurances counted a good deal among men with very little. For a man with money to put on airs was all right, but not a workingman. Gaffney wasn’t that way. He’d tell a joke and shake a hand and, if it so happened that he prospered, he’d buy a round at Greenie’s. It was Mather Grouse, who prospered as little as anyone, who suffered on this charge.
If they’d given the matter some thought, these men would’ve been surprised at the animosity they had collectively harbored against a man who had never wronged a single one of them. But when the opportunity arose for them to retaliate—as they saw it—not a single man abstained. It happened one warm spring afternoon, and the huge, ceiling-high windows had been pushed out to allow air to circulate in the stifling, smoke-filled shop. As they worked, the men closest to the open windows peered out wistfully into the bright sunshine. When the high school let out, pretty girls with armloads of books began to pass by below. Occasionally someone in the shop would whistle, but for the most part the men were circumspect, since they were, after all, their own daughters passing below. With older women, of course, it was a different story, and the men hooted enthusiastically, especially if they recognized the woman as the wife of a fellow worker.
They all knew Mather Grouse’s daughter on sight—the prettiest of all the girls, with the most womanly figure. When they saw her coming, they always nudged one another and exchanged knowing glances. Mather Grouse, though he worked at a window table, never indulged this afternoon pastime, never encouraged his daughter to stop in to see him. Perhaps this, too, was held against him, because he made the men feel unclean in their desire.
Though it was rare for any boy to find the courage to walk with Anne Grouse, some followed her progress in cars, circling the blocks, slowing down along the curb, talking to Anne and her girlfriends, hanging out the windows. Usually, she walked with a girlfriend, or alone. No one had ever seen her in the company of a boy whose father cut leather with Mather Grouse, until the afternoon she was spied in the company of young Billy Gaffney, who shuffled along beside her stoically, trying in vain to think of something to say. They walked in awkward silence, Billy scowling at himself yet very happy.
The men in the shop were also happy. At first there were only a few random hoots, but before long these were accompanied by explicit suggestions, and soon the men were hanging out the third floor window, each offering lewd encouragement to Rory Gaffney’s son, who showed signs of lapsing into neurotic lunacy as the advice rained down upon him. Embarrassed and confused, he didn’t realize that many of the anatomical suggestions were facetious. The more he was jeered and encouraged, the more confused he became, for the advice was varied and he seemed expected to carry it all out at once, despite the fact that none of these suggestions were on his agenda and some required more expertise than he possessed. He had never been in the company of a girl before, and the only advice his father had given him was never to be around one without a Trojan, advice Billy had neglected—and with disastrous consequences, just as his father had predicted, if he had followed the instructions of the men hanging from the windows.
Anne herself added to his confusion. If she had shown signs of being offended, he would’ve known how to 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 g
rateful.
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 girl had 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.