The Risk Pool (71 page)

He was fast asleep, the only visible sign of life the clouding, then clearing of his oxygen mask. He slept peacefully there until a nurse, the same one he’d asked about the spoon, came in, stopped dead in her tracks, assessed the situation at a glance and began undressing him. She was nearly finished when he woke up.

“You again,” he said.

“Me again,” she admitted.

“This is my son,” he said. “He’s all right … not like his old man.”

“He looks just like you,” she said.

When she was gone, my father pointed toward the painting on the wall. “See?” he said. “Now the wagon’s on the left.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

“How’d he do that?” my father wanted to know, as if he’d die a happy man if I could explain it to him. I couldn’t tell whether he meant the artist or the man driving the wagon, and I hadn’t the heart to tell him that the wagon had been on the left side of the road all along, that it hadn’t moved since the last time we’d looked at it, that the picture was just a cheap print, unworthy of his attention when there were so many things to say, things that wouldn’t get said if we didn’t say them soon.

But we sat there, my father and I, and stared at the wagon and the old covered bridge and the snow and the ice skaters and the frozen river, as if these were at the very heart of things, and had been forever.

At the airport I rented a car and took it onto the Thruway to avoid Albany, a gray city on the best of days, and this was not the best of days.

The VA was on the other side of town at the end of a long treeless drive, a tall building, stark and massive and undeniable as death. I parked the rental at the base of a recently plowed mountain of dingy snow and went inside. I’d been told I would have trouble locating room 135, but it was right where it should have been. A woman with a name plate that corresponded to what I had jotted down the morning before when the call came telling me of Sam Hall’s death was standing in the office doorway, carrying on a conversation with another woman in full retreat down the corridor. “Did you get through to North Carolina?”

The woman slowed, as if on an invisible leash, but continued to strain in the direction she was heading. “I got the sister-in-law. The brother is supposed to call when he gets home from work. I have my doubts.”

“Get some ice on the eyes just in case,” said my woman, who became aware of me in midsentence.

“Nice job you’ve got,” I said.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” she said, risking a half smile.

“Couldn’t be,” I said, introducing myself.

“Oh,” she said seriously. “Mr. Hall.”

For some reason I remembered a gag used by good ole boys and politicians. “No, Mr. Hall’s my father. My name’s Ned.” I almost used it.

The woman’s office was little more than a carrel with a small metal desk along one wall and several hundred brown packages, all one size, stacked all the way to the ceiling in one corner. “I’m
afraid I’m going to have to ask you to sign a release,” she said. “We still can’t find the anatomical gift form.”

I read the first sentence of the release and signed.

“According to your father, there was another copy. Do you think you could locate it?” she said, as if she suspected, now that she thought about it, that my signature wasn’t likely to hold up.

“I’ll try.”

“That’s all any of us can do,” she said, without a trace of humor. “Here’s a list of the items you can pick up downstairs. And you get a flag, of course.”

While I scanned the short itemized list—bathrobe, slippers, pajamas, wallet, button-down shirt, one pair of brown slacks, one pair of shorts, one pair of socks, one pair black shoes, one pair black overshoes, one overcoat, one wool cap—she stapled several onionskin documents to the inside of a manila folder, then got up and handed me one of the brown packages from the middle of the stack. It was surprisingly heavy.

“What about his glasses?” I said.

She looked at the list over my shoulder.

“I don’t see any reference to eyeglasses.”

“They were new. He’d just bought them.”

“There’s no reference here … I could call up to the ward …”

I said I didn’t see any reason to.

She studied my signatures, the one on the itemized personal effects sheet, the other on the consent form, as if to make sure they matched. “This will make things go more smoothly. Your father was a generous man. You should know that he could be with us anywhere from three months to two years.”

“I’ll try not to think about it.”

“The research is important …”

I said I didn’t doubt that.

“We all thought a great deal of your father,” she said.

I put the flag under my arm and stood up. “You knew him?”

“No,” she said. “That is, not personally.”

On the phone my mother had said it was a terrible, terrible shame. This was not in reference to Sam Hall’s death, but rather its timing. Isn’t it always the way, she wanted to know, her voice full of wonder, that at this time when we were all anticipating
LIFE, when life was expected any day, any MINUTE, for heaven’s sake, that I’d be required to go to Mohawk and attend to the details of my father’s departure. She was sure that there would be endless details, given the clutter of my father’s existence: unplanned funeral arrangements, dealings with people he’d borrowed money from, tedious conversations with the sort of people he knew. Well, at least it wasn’t like he and I had been inseparable, she went on, by which she didn’t mean that I didn’t love him or wouldn’t feel his loss. Of course I would. After all, I was a dutiful son, but what she meant was, well, we were different and all those years when he wasn’t around, when he chose not to be, well, ironically, maybe it was just as well. She would never forget the devastation she’d felt when her own father died, and Lord knew she wouldn’t wish that on me. Did I want to say hello to Will? Wouldn’t you think they’d been best friends? she wanted to know. I should see the look on his face.

From the VA I drove to Mohawk, the slender brown package of my father’s possessions on the front seat of the rental car with me, trying not to think about my mother, her insistence that I keep things in perspective (“Let’s talk about something cheerful! How’s our girl Leigh? I think if that baby doesn’t get here before the weekend, I’ll
die
, honestly!”).

I parked out back of the McKinley Luxury Apartments next to my father’s pale yellow Subaru. It was still his, I would learn later. He hadn’t had money for repairs and didn’t want to admit to that. Didn’t want me making offers.

When I went around front, I found Wussy sitting under the stone arch eating a sandwich. “Sam’s Kid,” he said, patting the stone step next to him.

“Well,” I said, accepting his invitation to join him. The freakish February weather had gone from subzero to low fifties in a week, but the stone steps were still cold.

“Right,” Wussy said. “Last week it was Untemeyer.”

“No kidding,” I said. I’d always considered the bookie to be immortal. Even more than Sam Hall.

“Died sitting up straight at the Mohawk Grill. Nobody noticed for a hell of a while. Fortunately, his stool was a little off balance and he eventually got turned around so he was staring out the
back door, which was unnatural for Meyer. He faced front for about eighty-five years.”

“You going over to Mike’s?” I said.

“Not me, Sam’s Kid. I’m staying home where it’s safe.”

I wished I didn’t have to go myself. Mike was closing The Elms at five, then holding there in the lounge what he referred to over the phone as a “send-off” in Sam Hall’s honor. I had an idea Irma was behind this, but I could have been wrong. The gathering would be by informal invitation. “Jesus Christ,” Mike said. “We gotta do something, even if it’s wrong.”

I knew how he felt. One of the last things my father had made me promise was that there’d be no funeral, no mass, no priest making up lies about him from a pulpit. I’d said sure, whatever he wanted, not thinking I’d have any trouble keeping such a promise. After all, who’d have expected Sam Hall to exit life by way of the altar? He hadn’t been inside a church in thirty years. Besides, there wasn’t even going to be a body—Albany Medical had dibs on that for up to two years. But now, like Mike, I couldn’t help thinking that we should do something, whether my father had wanted it or not. So I’d gone along with a “send-off” at The Elms. At least that way there was something to tell people who called wanting to know when and where the services were going to be.

The only trouble was that now, having agreed, I didn’t feel up to it. I even gave passing consideration to the idea of just slipping quietly out of town. It was doubtful I’d ever return to Mohawk after today, doubtful too that I’d even be missed among my father’s cronies, most of whom had to be reminded who I was when we met on the street. The send-off looked to be the kind of obligation I could default on without meaningful consequence.

“I wish I could get out of going myself,” I confessed to Wussy, thinking again of the semilegitimate justifications I might marshal in my own defense. Leigh had been having false labor pains for over a week. I could easily pretend to have received an urgent call. I could probably even talk Wussy into making my apologies for me. Perhaps because it would have been so easy, I decided not to act on the impulse.

Wussy finished his sandwich and wadded up the cellophane. “You got here a couple minutes earlier I’d’ve shared that with you,” he said. “Now you’ll have to get your own.”

“I need to go inside,” I told him. “The VA lost a form he signed.
He must have figured they would and kept a copy. They can’t find his new glasses either.”

“I happen to have a key,” he said, taking it off his chain.

I started to ask why, then intuited the situation. They had not made up, Wussy and my father. If Wussy had a key, he had gotten it from Smooth, a master key, probably, that would get him into the other apartments, so he could do the work of the resident manager.

We went inside the foyer and I inserted the key into the door of my father’s apartment, formerly the kindergarten of McKinley School. “I’ll be outside here if you need anything,” Wussy said, standing in the doorway as if he weren’t sure he’d been invited to follow. In fact, I didn’t think I could take any company. Not even his. I said I wouldn’t be long.

“You been down to the bank yet?”

I said I hadn’t. A week earlier my father had given me a check for just over two hundred dollars and made me promise to cash it before the bank froze his account. He was adamant that the electric company not get his last dime. Either Wussy knew about this too, or had guessed.

“There isn’t much,” I told him, taking the check out of my wallet. “I was going to leave it there.”

“You must not believe in ghosts,” Wussy said.

“I don’t really want the money,” I said. “I doubt I’m even entitled to it.”

“It’s up to you, Sam’s Kid,” Wussy said. “Give it to Eileen. Sam Hall was a prince compared to the little moron she ended up marrying. If women didn’t always want to save people, they’d be perfect.”

I handed him the check, which my father had predated and signed, but otherwise left blank. “I’ll leave it to your discretion,” I said. I almost suggested he keep it himself, since he’d no doubt earned it and a good deal besides during the last few weeks and down through the years, but I didn’t want to risk insulting his friendship. We looked around at my father’s apartment, Wussy still on the threshold.

It took me all of two seconds to locate the other copy of the anatomical gift. In a last-minute uncharacteristic fit of organization, he’d left everything important in his upper righthand dresser drawer. Wussy, or somebody, had piled his three weeks’ worth of accumulated mail right there under the mirror, so I went
through it to make sure there wasn’t anything I’d need later. Most of it was junk. I opened an insurance company envelope marked
IMPORTANT
, which contained a letter stating that because my father had had no accidents or speeding tickets for the past five years, he was now eligible for insurance outside the risk pool, at considerably reduced rates.

By the time I was finished, Wussy had returned from the bank.

“You sure you don’t want this,” he said.

“Very sure.”

We shook hands there on the schoolhouse steps.

“He was my friend, Ned,” Wussy said. And then he invited me to come up sometime so we could go fishing. “I don’t know about anymore,” he said. “But you used to be a good patient fisherman.”

Before going over to The Elms, I drove to Fonda and onto the small bridge that spanned the Mohawk River. There was one other thing I had discovered in the righthand drawer of my father’s dresser—a .38 caliber revolver purchased, no doubt, as a hedge against the final ravages of the disease. It was this, I now realized, that he had wanted me to take him home to that afternoon almost three weeks before. I’ve never been able to resolve in my own mind whether or not he would have done it, and I couldn’t that February afternoon as I stood on the bridge above the Mohawk River. If he had been able to do it, he’d have spared himself two senseless operations during those final weeks, and God only knew how many indignities, the last of which was an heroic attempt to resuscitate him, in direct violation of the written instructions he’d placed on his bedstand and which, now, were neatly folded somewhere in the same unmarked envelope that contained the anatomical gift he’d made of his remains.

But I cannot fault the doctors. In my own way, I too was unable to execute his wishes. He’d begged me before I left that afternoon when he’d tried to go home to stay away from the hospital, now that it was just a matter of time. But I couldn’t, and toward the end I saw in his eyes each time that I appeared beside his bed that he was glad to see me, and scared as hell of dying alone. Which he ended up doing anyway.

The quirky February warm spell had thawed patches near the center of the icebound river where black water could be seen rolling swiftly, even in the late afternoon dusk. Spring, it occurred
to me, was the season my grandfather had left out of his scheme of things, his personal credo.