The Risk Pool (26 page)

“Well?” he said, pointing out one last sign.

What he was after, of course, was a smile, and I was holding out, as usual. Once he decided you owed him a smile, he just kept after you until you paid up. Normally, I would have given in, but I didn’t feel like smiling at him today. As soon as I gave him what he wanted, he’d stop razzing me and want to know about her, how she’d looked, whether we’d talked, what we’d said. I preferred the razzing.

I knew it was cruel of me to want to withhold information about her condition from him, but I did. It wasn’t that I was particularly angry with him anymore. And it certainly wasn’t that I wanted to protect him from any guilt he might be feeling concerning her, since I wasn’t sure he felt any, unless you count as guilt a vague,
general regret at the way things sometimes worked out. Rather, I didn’t want to open the subject of my mother’s condition because I knew I’d start lying to him. I couldn’t tell him that my visit had lasted all of five minutes; that after he’d let me out in front of the home at one, promising to return at three, I had discovered her frail and alone in the large communal dining room next to the long window that overlooked the rambling, shadowy grounds out back, where tall pine trees prevented the sun from melting the still deep snow; that I had not been permitted to just walk up to her like a son, but had to wait while she was “prepared” for me, her mind given the opportunity to adjust; that a nurse had been dispatched to tell her, startling my mother out of her meditation on the reluctant, wintry grounds beyond the protective glass; how she had listened for the longest time, not appearing to comprehend, then finally looked slowly around the large room until her gaze fell upon me beneath the tall archway, seeing there someone she was not sure she recognized.

And who could blame her? I hardly recognized myself, having grown a couple inches in the seven months since she’d seen me last and become even more angular and birdlike as a result. Since going to live with my father, I wasn’t the same boy. I felt certain that I carried myself differently now, that my gait was altered, my mannerisms different. Had I swung my arms before, when I had been her son, the way I did now? Did I have, back then, my current habit of standing on one foot? Had I that sullen expression that sometimes surprised me in the cloudy bathroom mirror of my father’s apartment? I wanted to be her son again, if only for the afternoon, but I’d forgotten how and did not know where to begin.

When the nurse finally motioned to me, I went toward them slowly. When I reached the table where my mother was sitting, the nurse took her hand and then mine, so that we could touch. “Jenny,” she said. “This is your son Ned. Do you know him?”

“Why, yes,” my mother said. She had watched me all the way across the room, but the other woman’s question distracted her now and she looked away from me and up at the nurse. “This is my son Ned.”

“And a very fine-looking young man,” the nurse said. “You must be very proud.”

My eyes were already full, but the nurse took no notice. Instead she pulled up a chair from a nearby table and sat me down next
to my mother. “Now I know how happy you are to see Ned,” the nurse said. “But you mustn’t forget to eat your lunch.”

My mother was looking at me again and did not appear to hear.

“Jenny?” the woman repeated, and this time my mother heard and looked down at her plate, which clearly had not been touched, a small square of something under a coating of tomato sauce, alongside some washed-out-looking peas and a tiny roll, all of it cold and unappetizing. “Would you like me to stay?”

Only when my mother lifted her fork and slid it beneath the triangle of peas did the nurse leave us alone. I watched my mother chew the peas, her attention again drawn to the scene outside her window. “The snow won’t go away,” she said, as if this were a matter for concern.

“It has, most places,” I told her.

“Fourth of July, Mohawk Fair, Eat the Bird, and Winter,” she said, then turned to me, smiling. “Good Ned.”

Almost unbelievably, we stopped in at The Elms on the way home. Over the years one of the points I’ve debated about my father is whether he was in those days impossible or just very difficult to embarrass. Here it was less than twenty-four hours after he’d started a fight there; a normal human being would have taken at least a temporary leave of absence from its vicinity, especially since it wasn’t one of his regular in-town haunts anyway. True, Eileen worked there, assuming Irma hadn’t fired her for consorting with undesirables, and sometimes my father stopped in for a quick one before she got off her shift, but he had already demonstrated during the long months when he was broke that he could live without The Elms, where Mike got “some kind of a price for a lousy bottle of beer.” So, it seemed to me the easiest and (considering Eileen) the kindest thing in the world to give Mike and Irma wide berth for a few penitential weeks, at least until the sharp edges of their current and completely understandable resentment were worn smooth by other concerns.

But no. Back we went, like iron filings to a magnet. I could feel myself glowing scarlet with shame when we pulled into the nearly empty parking lot. It was late afternoon, in between the big after-church wave and the smaller early evening one. I could tell by my father’s gait that he saw no reason we shouldn’t be a welcome antidote to the late Sunday afternoon boredom that was
sure to have gripped the place, especially if the basketball game was one-sided and the previous evening’s exhaustion imperfectly banished. To his mind, we were just what the joint needed. If Mike and Irma wanted to remember something about the night before, let them recall how he’d washed glasses and sliced fruit. He’d bailed them out, and maybe it was time they showed a little gratitude.

Pretty clearly though, gratitude was not Irma’s first emotion when we appeared in the doorway of the dark lounge. She was seated at one end of the horseshoe bar next to her husband, who was hanging dripping cocktail glasses upside down from the overhead rack.

“You’re gone,” she said, looking first at my father, then at Mike. “You hear me? He’s all done here.”

She was sucking on a maraschino cherry, its stem rotating in the gap between her large front teeth. Mike shrugged like it might be true. He didn’t even give me the usual quarter for the jukebox. Eileen appeared in the doorway to the dining room, shook her head in amazement, and disappeared again. The dining room was practically empty, except for two busboys clearing and prepping tables for the dinner crowd.

My father winked at Mike and put an arm around Irma’s big shoulders. “Let’s you and me ditch this stiff,” he stage-whispered. “We’ll go throw down a blanket in the walk-in cooler. Like the old days.” Then he took the maraschino cherry stem and pulled.

“Git!” she elbowed him hard in the ribs, though not as hard as she might have. He held his ground.

“Your trouble is you just need a little of the old innee-outee,” he said. “Relax you a little, so you aren’t so mean all the while.”

“How the hell would you know what I need?” she said, but even I could see she was loosening up under his outrageous onslaught.

“I’m the expert,” he said.

“You’re the eighty-sixed expert. Go be expert someplace else. Kill somebody else’s business.” She took a toothpick from the glassful on the bar and jabbed the back of my father’s hand with it, slipping neatly out of his embrace. “He’s history,” she warned Mike again.

When she was gone, Mike slipped me a quarter for Duane Eddy and my father went around the bar and got himself a bottle of beer so Mike wouldn’t get in trouble.

“You better watch out,” Mike warned him. “She ever takes you up on one of your offers you’ll be one sorry son of a bitch.”

My father shivered at the thought. “I don’t know how you do it,” he admitted, his voice full of genuine admiration.

“What,” Mike said. “I haven’t been as close to her as you just were in a month. I never come out from behind here you know.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“How did she get that way is what I always wonder.”

My father shrugged. “It could have something to do with the fact that every time you get a couple grand ahead you take it to Vegas and come home without it.”

“Think so?”

“Yes, I do. Take her with you sometime. She works hard too.”

“I always have more fun with you.”

“I can’t help that.”

Mike studied me, then returned to my father. “He looks better today, anyway.”

“Took him to see his mother. We just got back.”

“How is she?”

“Better, according to my source. I’m the only one not allowed in.”

“She should have been so smart fifteen years ago.”

“She’s not so smart now. It’s our buddy with the fat lip that had it fixed. I so much as walk in the front door and I’m in the caboose.”

“You figure he could fix it so I’m not allowed to see Irma?”

“Probably.”

“You cost me a round of ten drinks and two complete dinners, you know.”

“You want some money?” my father offered.

Mike waved goodbye to the idea. “The guy comes in once in a blue moon. Everybody else enjoyed it. I always said you were better than a floor show. Don’t offer Irma though, unless you want her to take it.”

“All right, I won’t.”

Eileen came in and sat down next to me. “How’s your mother?” she said.

“Good,” I said, grateful to be spoken to.

“Really? She’s getting better?”

I nodded. Maybe it was true. When I’d left, the nurse told me that her eating in the dining room was a new thing, and that the dosage of her medicines was being gradually reduced. “She’ll be coming home one day,” the nurse had promised.

Strangely enough, that was the last thing my mother had said.
For the longest time she had stared quietly out into the deep snowy trees, so long that I had concluded that she forgot I was there. But then she had turned and taken my hand and said, “Be brave. Before long we’ll be home again.”

By home she no doubt meant the house with the For Sale sign out front, the one that would be devoured by the cost of her care, whether or not my father signed on F. William Peterson’s dotted line.

Some people came in and then some others. The Elms dining room began to fill. We were getting ready to leave when the door opened and the man from the white jewel house who sometimes came out and stared at Drew and me at the end of his long drive appeared. With him was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and she looked about my age.

“Hey,
look
out,” Jack Ward said, squinting in our general direction. He was dressed wonderfully, like somebody from another part of the world who’d come to a modest party expecting an extravagant one. He was wearing a cream-colored, lightweight sport coat over a light blue shirt and peach-colored sweater and slacks. His shoes were white mesh. He was tanned, somehow (so was the beautiful girl), and his longish, light brown hair swept back from his high forehead and settled behind his ears as if each strand had been cut to a precise length and trained. “I think we’ve stumbled into the wrong place,” he said to the girl. “Look at
this
crew.”

At the moment the whole crew consisted of Mike, my father, and me, and we were unsavory only in comparison to himself and the girl, it seemed to me.

My father looked Jack Ward over critically. “Must be tops to be loaded.”

“Sam,” the other man said as they shook hands, “it is. I recommend it to everybody. You remember my daughter Tria.”

“I remember the little thing that used to bounce on my knee.”

Tria Ward frowned and looked up at her father as if to inquire whether this could be true. But she did allow my father to put an arm around her. “Hi, dolly. Are you married?”

Jack Ward had stepped away from his daughter’s side and made a circular motion to Mike with an elegant index finger. “And for yourself,” he added quietly. Magically, there was a crisp fifty
between his middle and ring finger and he slid it across the mahogany as if he were proposing to Mike some secret transaction. “We can do this without fanfare, you and I,” the gesture seemed to imply. “It will be so quiet that no one will know that it’s been done, and that will be its beauty.” Almost as deftly, Mike spirited the money into the register before going to work, confident that Jack Ward did not intend for the money to sit there on the bar attracting attention to itself.

What was most amazing is that I noticed any of this, because I swear I had not once taken my eyes off Tria Ward. I think I contemplated homicide against my father for putting his arm around her. Couldn’t he see how shy she was and how embarrassed to be hugged by an adult stranger in a dark lounge? How close to panic she was now that her father was no longer at her side? I was suddenly burning with indignation that my father thought he had the right to touch this lovely girl, herself as perfectly clean and fresh as her father.

No, she told my father, she was not married.

“That’s good,” my father gave her shoulder a squeeze. “You know, I happen to be available.”

“You’re also just the sort of old goat she’s been warned about,” Jack Ward said, his grin displaying two rows of perfectly white teeth.

“I tell you what,” my father said. “How about I introduce you to somebody your own age. He’s not as good-looking as his father, but you can’t have everything.”

Suddenly, everyone was looking at me, as luck would have it, just as a song ended on the jukebox. Tria Ward gave me a weak smile, as if to acknowledge my reality, or perhaps the fact that I wasn’t
too
bad-looking, or that, yes, it was true, I wasn’t as good-looking as my father.

And in response to her beautiful smile, I bleated.

I remember the horror of it even now. The sound I made resembled no word. It didn’t even sound human. My father blinked, probably in disbelief, and for long terrible seconds nobody said anything. I flushed so deeply that my skin burned.

During that first year with my father, I often had the feeling of having disgraced myself, but the moment I bleated at Tria Ward, I knew that if I were to become a murderer, a traitor to my country, and an abject coward in the face of battle, I would never feel lower or more worthy of universal disdain than I felt at that moment, a prediction, I am happy to say, that has been borne out.