The Risk Pool (70 page)

“You don’t have to worry, though,” he said. “I won’t live to be a hundred.”

“It’s fine with me if you do,” I told him. “Be two hundred.”

“Your dolly there?”

“Yes,” I said before I could think, responding to a reflex that did not want to admit to him that she was gone, maybe for good.

“Put her on a minute.”

“She’s out … Christmas shopping actually.”

“Then why’d you say she was there?”

“I meant here in the city.”

“Where the hell else would she be?”

“Right,” I said. “I’m really glad about the news, Dad. I can’t believe it.”

“Me either,” he said. “The only problem is the last treatment did something to my eyes. I suddenly can’t see worth a shit.”

“What’s your doctor say?”

“New glasses. Thick ones. I’d get them except things are a little tight right now …”

“Listen,” I said. “Would a couple hundred help?”

“You could if you wanted,” he said. I could see him shrugging on the other end of the line. “I don’t need them, really. There’s nothing in this town worth looking at, and not a goddamn thing I haven’t already seen a hundred times more than I wanted to.”

So we left it that I’d send a check in the morning, not because he needed it, or because he wanted me to, but because I insisted. When we hung up, I discovered that instead of feeling elation, I was mildly, maybe even more than mildly, irritated with him. At first I thought it was because of the way he’d started out, saying he was “all done,” a phrase even my father must have realized invited the wrong interpretation. Then I thought maybe it was the business about the glasses, his stubborn unwillingness to accept help, his insistence that everybody understand that any consideration or concern or affection shown him was done purely for the edification of the giver. But the annoyance went even deeper, and I knew it as I stared out the apartment window and up into the darkening New York sky. My reflection in the glass allowed me a brief, horrible glance at what lay at the heart of things. Strangely enough, I’d been thinking about it for days, ever since
I’d gone with Leigh to the airport and put her on the plane. What I’d been denying, even as I worried it like a scab, was the possibility that my father was the reason I was losing Leigh. I had made a terrible mistake, it occurred to me, in telling her all about him, of painting his portrait so vividly, of allowing her extended conversations with him on the phone. And I realized how grateful I was that circumstances had prevented their actual meeting. Had they done so, had Leigh been able to see my father and me standing shoulder to shoulder, she would at that moment have understood me, who I was, where I came from, all the things that—it now came home to me—I had been carefully concealing from her.

In his own way my father had both understood and expressed what I’d been feeling in that long moment of silence that had followed the news of his cure. I was afraid that he would live to be a hundred.

I didn’t go to Mohawk the week between Christmas and New Year’s, nor the week after that. To my surprise, Leigh called and said she was returning to the city the day before New Year’s. On the phone she sounded depressed, but refused to talk about her stay in Colorado. At the time I concluded that her mother must have been lurking nearby. I didn’t care, really. I was too happy to discover that Leigh was returning a week early—that she was returning at all—to press for details.

At La Guardia, she seemed happy to see me and she did not object when I told her I’d made reservations for a late dinner that night. I had in mind that we would see the new year in quietly, privately. She looked tired though, and I insisted she take a nap when we got back to the apartment. She slept the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening. I didn’t go in until it was
time to dress or miss our reservation, and I found her there in the semidark, awake and thoughtful, and again, it seemed, glad to see me. We walked to the restaurant through wet, slow-motion snow that fell straight down and melted on impact everywhere except along the cast iron fences and window gratings. On the way Leigh told me she’d been to see a gynecologist in Denver and that it was his opinion that we’d miscalculated—she was nearly a month farther along than we’d thought, which explained a lot. February now, not March. In fact, she was noticeably larger, and she was carrying our child right out in front now, though still high. Perhaps because I could tell that it mattered to Leigh, I said I didn’t see what difference it made that we’d miscalculated, except that she was that much closer to the end of her discomfort. I knew her thinking though, and did not, for once, make matters worse by proposing again. That she had come back filled me with hope, and I didn’t want to ruin New Year’s Eve.

The quiet restaurant I’d chosen turned out to be anything but quiet, and the dark corner table I’d envisioned turned out to be in the center of the dining room. The place was still hopping at ten o’clock. People we didn’t know stopped to congratulate us on Leigh’s condition. We were sent a bottle of champagne by an elderly couple in the corner booth I’d hoped for, along with instructions that I was to drink most of it.

I was worried about Leigh, but I shouldn’t have been, because she did fine, as if she’d discovered that the attentions she’d been trying to avoid were not to be feared after all. We had a good meal and everyone seemed to understand when we decided to leave ten minutes before the new year’s arrival. We were escorted to the door by a dozen or so revelers and well-wishers, including the elderly couple who’d sent over the champagne. They offered to share a taxi with us, which we politely declined, explaining that we lived only a few blocks away. It had stopped snowing by then and as we walked slowly along the dusted sidewalks we listened to the mixed sounds of several parties cascading down from the apartments above.

And so the new year was ushered in without much help from Leigh and me. The clock above the refrigerator said five after midnight when we came in, and we undressed and climbed into bed without reference to the future and without making a single resolution, together or individually regarding it. When the lights were out, Leigh began to cry, and I let her until she felt better
or, failing that, felt like stopping. “She’s a horrible woman,” Leigh said finally. “Small and mean-spirited and self-centered. I don’t blame Daddy a bit.”

“Well …” I began.

“Don’t,” she said. “I don’t want to be comforted. I just want you to know that I’m just like her. If you marry me, I’ll probably end up driving you to somebody else, and then I’ll blame you for it and so will everybody. You’ll even blame yourself.”

“What do you want?” I said. “Do you want me to promise not to blame myself?”

She thought about it. “I don’t want to be my mother. I want to be who I want to be.”

“Fine,” I said, stroking her hair. “Your wish is granted.”

I heard the first ring as I stepped into the shower, but Leigh was there to answer it, so I climbed in anyway. She had started her maternity leave the last week in January to wait out the final few weeks in our warm apartment. It was now the first week of February and we were in the middle of the longest stretch of subzero weather since they’d started keeping records. It was the kind of demoralizing cold that I imagined had caused my grandfather to capitalize “Winter.”

Leigh slid the shower door open partway and peeked in. “Hello there.”

“Hello,” I said.

“You know anybody named Norm? Sounds like long distance.”

I started to say no, then realized who it was and got out of the shower.

“You know where the Albany VA is?” Wussy’s voice crackled in the receiver.

I said I did.

“Then you better get on up there.”

I sat down. “Not again?”

“Everywhere, this time. Or so I hear. Sorry, Sam’s Kid. I figured you’d want to know.”

The oxygen mask that covered my father’s nose and mouth clouded, then cleared, then clouded again, tracking his sleeping respiration. His face was gaunt and yellow and rich with graying
stubble. Even now he had most of his hair, though it had become patchy in the month or so since he’d called to tell me he was cured. The most dramatic change was in his body, which now occasioned little more than a ripple beneath the covers of the hospital bed. The arm that was connected to the I.V. was thin and dry and jaundiced. According to the nurse, he would be waking up soon when the pain killer he’d been given that morning began to wear off.

On the wall opposite his bed was a print that depicted a New England winter. In the foreground a horse-drawn wagon was emerging from a covered bridge, below which stick figures were skating on the frozen river. I don’t know how long I’d been studying it when my father said, “That’s some goddamn picture, isn’t it?”

He’d removed the oxygen mask so he could speak, but he immediately replaced it when he finished. He was looking at the painting as if it genuinely consumed his interest.

“See how it’s on … the left side of the road?” he said. “The wagon? In a few … minutes it’ll be over there … on the right side … wait … you’ll see.”

He could only get out a few words before breaking off, gulping oxygen. After catching his breath though, he inched like a crab toward a sitting position. When I saw what he was trying to do, I stood to help, but he waved me off and finally accomplished the design himself. The effort cost him his breath again and it was a while before he spoke. Finally, he said, “Who blabbed?”

“Smooth called,” I said, lying instinctively to protect Wussy, realizing even as I spoke that there was no reason to protect anybody from Sam Hall’s wrath. Not anymore.

“Figures,” he said, then thought about it. “How’d he get your number?”

I said I was in the book, and that seemed to satisfy him.

“Well,” he said. “This is about it, I’m afraid.”

“They lied to you, didn’t they,” I said.

He shrugged, closed his eyes sluggishly, opened them again. “That’s all right … I never believed them … anyway … when you still got it … you know.”

“You might have told me.”

He looked at me. “What for?”

“Because I’m your son,” I said, almost adding, “because I love you.”

“So … you had a month without … any headaches … my treat.”

“I shouldn’t have believed you. I should have guessed.”

“You never … could tell when I was lying,” he said, grinning weakly, in reference to our old game. “How’s your dolly?”

“Good,” I said.

“You figure you’ll marry her.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “You need somebody to … look after you … I never did, myself.”

“She’s a good girl,” I said.

“Seems like it,” he said. “Don’t bring her … here … I’d like to meet her but …” He looked away, in the general direction of the hall, which was brightly lit, in contrast to the perpetual dusk of the room.

“See my new cheaters?” he said, spying them on the bedstand and handing them to me.

I tried them on, made a face, handed them back to him.

“New apartment … new glasses … new television … new furniture … old everything else. Smooth asks you … to pay for anything … tell him where to get off.”

“I will.”

Neither of us said anything for a minute, but I could tell he was worried about the way he was leaving things.

“Do me a favor,” he said finally, taking off the oxygen mask and tossing it on the bed.

“Sure,” I said, figuring that he was going to ask me to adjust the bed or something.

“Take me home,” he said. “To hell with this place.”

I blinked.

But he’d swung his thin legs over the side of the bed and was pointing to the small closet where his clothes hung.

I stood, but made no move to get them. “Dad,” I said. “You can’t. You’d never make it.
We’d
never make it.”

“Just … do like I say for once,” he said.

And then he stood up.

Seeing him do it filled me with awe. There was absolutely nothing left of him, you see. The nurses would tell me later that he had not eaten in days. For a week he’d politely pushed the tray away when it was set in front of him, unless there was ice cream, which tasted good to him, for some reason. Then one night he’d
seen they were serving something he remembered liking and was for some reason half hungry. He thought he’d try a little, provided they’d hold the gravy, which he never could eat even when he was healthy. But despite his plea it had come smothered with gravy, and he’d picked up the dish and tossed it out into the hall. When the tough head nurse came in and read him the riot act, he’d told her from now on they could serve the food any goddamn way they liked, because he wasn’t going to eat it anyway.

“Have you ever been force-fed, Mr. Hall?” the nurse had asked him.

“Have you ever had a spoon shoved up your ass?” he’d replied. “Sideways?”

And the next night when he didn’t eat dinner he had the spoon in his hand when the nurse came in. She’d taken one look, shaken her head, and retreated, returning for the tray and the spoon after he’d fallen asleep. He hadn’t eaten since.

So when he stood up and made clear to me that it was his intention to get dressed, with my help or without it, I did what I have never regretted doing. I got him his clothes and helped him into them. There weren’t enough holes in his belt, so we had to tie it in a knot to keep his pants up. He swam in everything else, too, and by the time we were finished, he looked like nothing so much as a pile of discarded clothing awaiting a Salvation Army truck.

“Now,” he said. “Go steal me a wheelchair … strap that mask on before you leave.”

And so I did, suddenly right in the spirit of things, as if by sneaking out of the hospital, we could sneak away from the disease. It was an ability he had right to the end, to involve me in any lunacy, by the sheer force of his will. So off I went in search of a wheelchair, as instructed, delighted to be of service, wondering only vaguely if I was doing something I could be prosecuted for later. It took me about five minutes to locate a wheelchair on an adjacent ward. By the time I returned with it, he had leaned back against the wall to rest, his booted feet up on the bed in front of him.