The Risk Pool (2 page)

Until I was six I thought of my father the way I thought of “my heavenly father,” whose existence was a matter of record, but who was, practically speaking, absent and therefore irrelevant. My mother had filed for divorce the day after my grandfather’s funeral, but she didn’t end up getting it. When he heard what she was up to, my father went to see her lawyer. He didn’t exactly have an appointment, but then he didn’t need one out in the parking lot where he strolled back and forth, his fists thrust deep into his pockets, his steaming breath visible in the cold, waiting until F. William Peterson, Attorney-At-Law, closed up. It was one of the bleak dead days between Christmas and New Year’s. I don’t think my mother specifically warned F. William there would be serious opposition to her design and that the opposition might conceivably be extralegal in nature. F. William Peterson had been selected by my mother precisely because he was not a Mohawk native and did not know my father. He had moved there just a few months before to join as a junior partner a firm which employed his law school roommate. I imagine he had already begun to doubt his decision to come to Mohawk even before meeting my father in the gray half-light of late afternoon. F. William Peterson was a soft man of some bulk, well dressed in a knee-length overcoat with a fur collar, when he finally appeared in the deserted parking lot at quarter to five. Never an athletic man, he was engaged in pulling on a fine new pair of gloves, a Christmas gift
from Mrs. Peterson, while trying at the same time not to lose his footing on the ice. My father never wore gloves and was not wearing any that day. For warmth, he blew into his cupped hands, steam escaping from between his fingers, as he came toward F. William Peterson, who, intent on his footing and his new gloves, hadn’t what a fair-minded man would call much of a chance. Finding himself suddenly seated on the ice, warm blood salty on his lower lip, the attorney’s first conclusion must have been that somehow, despite his care, he had managed to lose his balance. Just as surprisingly, there was somebody standing over him who seemed to be making rather a point of not offering him a hand up. It wasn’t even a hand that dangled in F. William’s peripheral vision, but a fist. A clenched fist. And it struck the lawyer in the face a second time before he could account for its being there.

F. William Peterson was not a fighting man. Indeed, he had not been in the war, and had never offered physical violence to any human. He loathed physical violence in general, and this physical violence in particular. Every time he looked up to see where the fist was, it struck him again in the face, and after this happened several times, he considered it might be better to stop looking up. The snow and ice were pink beneath him, and so were his new gloves. He thought about what his wife, an Italian woman five years his senior and recently grown very large and fierce, would say when she saw them and concluded right then and there, as if it were his most pressing problem, that he would purchase an identical pair on the way home. Had he been able to see his own face, he’d have known that the gloves were not his most pressing problem.

“You do
not
represent Jenny Hall,” said the man standing in the big work boots with the metal eyelets and leather laces.

He
did
represent my mother though, and if my father thought that beating F. William Peterson up and leaving him in a snowbank would be the end of the matter he had an imperfect understanding of F. William Peterson and, perhaps, the greater part of the legal profession. My father was arrested half an hour later at the Mohawk Grill in the middle of a hamburg steak. F. William Peterson identified the work boots with the metal eyelets and leather laces, and my father’s right hand was showing the swollen effects of battering F. William Peterson’s skull. None of which was the sort of identification that was sure to hold up in court, and the lawyer knew it, but getting my father tossed in jail, however
briefly, seemed like a good idea. When he was released, pending trial, my father was informed that a peace bond had been sworn against him and that if he, Sam Hall, was discovered in the immediate proximity of F. William Peterson, he would be fined five hundred dollars and incarcerated. The cop who told him all this was one of my father’s buddies and was very apologetic when my father wanted to know what the hell kind of free country he’d spent thirty-five months fighting for would allow such a law. It stank, the cop admitted, but if my father wanted F. William Peterson thrashed again, he’d have to get somebody else to do it. That was no major impediment, of course, but my father couldn’t be talked out of the premise that in a truly free country, he’d be allowed to do it himself.

So, instead of going to see F. William Peterson, he went to see my mother.
She
hadn’t sworn out any peace bond against him that he knew of. Probably she couldn’t, being his wife. It might not be perfect, but it was at least some kind of free country they were living in. Here again, however, F. William Peterson was a step ahead of him, having called my mother from his room at the old Nathan Littler Hospital, so she’d be on the lookout. When my father pulled up in front of the house, she called the cops without waiting for pleasantries, of which there turned out to be none anyway. They shouted at each other through the front door she wouldn’t unlock.

My mother started right out with the main point. “I don’t love you!” she screamed.

“So what?” my father countered. “I don’t love you either.”

Surprised or not, she did not miss a beat. “I want a divorce.”

“Then you can’t have one,” my father said.

“I don’t need your permission.”

“Like hell you don’t,” he said. “And you’ll need more than a candy-ass lawyer and a cheap lock to keep me out of my own house.” By way of punctuation, he put his shoulder into the door, which buckled but did not give.

“This is my father’s house, Sam Hall.
You
never had anything and you never will.”

“If you aren’t going to open that door,” he warned, “you’d better stand back out of the way.”

My mother did as she was told, but just then a police cruiser pulled up and my father vaulted the porch railing and headed off through the deep snow in back of the house. One of the cops gave
chase while the other circled the block in the car, cutting off my father’s escape routes. It must have been quite a spectacle, the one cop chasing, until he was tuckered out, yelling, “We know who you are!” and my father shouting over his shoulder, “So what?” He knew nobody was going to shoot him for what he’d done (what
had
he done, now that he thought about it?). A man certainly had the right to enter his own house and shout at his own wife, which was exactly what she’d keep being until
he
decided to divorce
her
.

It must have looked like a game of tag. All the neighbors came out on their back porches and watched, cheering my father, who dodged and veered expertly beyond the outstretched arms of the pursuing cops, for within minutes, the backyards of our block were lousy with uniformed men who finally succeeded in forming a wide ring and then shrinking it, the neighbors’ boos at this unfair tactic ringing in their ears. My mother watched from the back porch as the tough, wet, angry cops closed in on my father. She pretty much decided right there against the divorce idea.

It dawned on her much later that the best way of ensuring my father’s absence was to demand he shoulder his share of the burden of raising his son. But until then, life was rich in our neighborhood. When he got out of jail, my father would make a beeline for my mother’s house (she’d had his things put in storage and changed the locks, which to her mind pretty much settled the matter of ownership), where he’d be arrested again for disturbing the peace. His visits to the Mohawk County jail got progressively longer, and so each time he got out he was madder than before. Finally, one of his buddies on the Mohawk P.D. took him aside and told him to stay the hell away from Third Avenue, because the judge was all through fooling around. Next time he was run in, he’d be in the slam a good long while. Since that was the way things stood, my father promised he’d be a good boy and go home, wherever that might be. Since one place was as good as another, he rented a room across from the police station so they’d know right where to find him. He borrowed some money and got a couple things out of storage and set them in the middle of the rented room. Then he went out again.

He started drinking around three in the afternoon and by dinnertime found a poker game, a good one, as luck would have it, with all good guys and no problems. Except that by ten my father had lost what he had on him and had to leave the game in search
of a soft touch. That time of night, finding somebody with a spare hundred on him was no breeze, even though everybody knew Sam Hall was good for it. He hit a couple of likely spots, then started on the unlikely ones. He got some drinks bought for him, sort of consolation, by people who wouldn’t or couldn’t loan him serious cash. Midnight found him in the bar of The Elms, a classy restaurant on the outskirts of town, where he tried to put the touch on Jimmy Albanese, and who should walk in but F. William Peterson, and on his arm a good-looking young woman who happened not to be his wife, but was surely someone’s. The lawyer took her to a dark, corner booth and they disappeared into its shadows. When the cocktail waitress came back to the bar with their order, my father said he’d cover the round and would she tell his friends “Up the Irish.” When F. William Peterson looked over and saw my grinning father with his glass raised, the blood drained from his face. He recognized his former assailant from the diner, of course, and had in fact been on the lookout for him, especially in parking lots, though lately he had relaxed his vigilance somewhat after my mother informed him of her decision to drop divorce proceedings, a decision he went on record as opposing on general principle and because it meant he’d taken a horrible beating for nothing. Had she bothered to inform her husband that she had dropped the suit? the lawyer wondered. Probably not, or what the hell would Sam Hall be doing at The Elms? It would be just like her not to tell him, and now he’d have to think of a way to avoid another beating, this time in a public place. A public place he wasn’t supposed to be, in the company of a woman whose husband worked the night shift. The good news was that the bar was still pretty crowded, and he doubted Sam Hall would assault him until the place cleared out a little. He and the young woman could make a run for the parking lot, but he doubted they’d make it and he’d have to explain to the woman why they were running, and this was hardly the image of himself that he chose to cultivate. Probably the best thing, F. William Peterson concluded, would be to determine the man’s intentions and try to talk him out of them. So he got up, excused himself, and went over to where my father sat talking to Jimmy Albanese.

“You understand,” he said to my father, “that by sitting on that stool, you are violating the peace bond sworn against you, an offense for which you could be incarcerated?”

My father looked over at Jimmy Albanese, who happened to be
the next best thing to a lawyer, having failed the New York bar exam on three separate occasions.

“He’s full of shit,” was the honorable Jimmy’s expert assessment. “You come in first. He’s harassing
your
ass.”

“I tell you what,” my father said. “You let me take a hundred right now, and I forget the whole thing. You get the hundred back on Wednesday. Friday the latest.”

It was a strange request, but F. William Peterson was tempted because he was very afraid of my father, who he was now convinced was certifiable. Unfortunately, he was a little short. “I can let you have fifty …”

My father frowned. “Fifty.”

The lawyer showed him his wallet, which contained fifty-seven dollars.

“All right,” my father said reluctantly, pocketing the money. It was better than nothing, and it was easier to touch somebody else for the other half a hundred. And besides, he’d just had an idea. “I guess that makes us even. Thanks.”

He was in a hurry, but there was a telephone booth outside The Elms and my father could feel that his luck was changing. Everything was beginning to have that falling-into-place feeling. Before driving to my mother’s, he called Mrs. F. William Peterson. Yes, she knew right where The Elms was located. And yes, if she hurried she supposed she could meet her husband there in fifteen minutes.

Now
they were even.

By the time he got to Third Avenue it was late and the house was dark, but he managed to raise my mother. “Don’t call the cops,” he said urgently when he heard stirring inside.

My mother suspected a trick and raised the shade and window tentatively.

“Let me take fifty till tomorrow,” he said.

“What?”

“Fifty. I’ll pay you back tomorrow and after that I’ll stay clear of here.”

“Will you give me a divorce?”

“No,” he said. “But I won’t bother you anymore. That’s the deal.”

My mother knew him and knew she had him. “We have a son to raise,” she said. “I can’t do it alone. You’ll have to give me fifty a month.”

He thought about it. “Okay,” he said finally. “Sure.”

With matters settled thus satisfactorily out of court, my mother gave him the money and considered herself fortunate, which she was. She would never collect a dime of the informal, modest alimony settlement, but then she didn’t expect to. The important thing was that she’d gotten my father to agree to it in a moment of weakness, and he’d feel guilty about not keeping his word, and he’d stay a suitable distance rather than give her the opportunity to bring the matter up. After a year or so, the debt would be considerable and he would be alert to chance meetings on the street and, in effect, she would have her divorce. She slept soundly that night, knowing the burden she had placed on him. As it turned out, her strategy worked better than she could have hoped, because in the middle of June she ran into F. William Peterson, who informed her that Sam Hall had blown town. The lawyer also wanted to know if she’d like to go out with him sometime, what with Mrs. Peterson divorcing him and all.