The Risk Pool (8 page)

“Ned?” my mother’s voice floated in, high and false from the kitchen. “Would you ask our guest if he’d like something cool to drink?”

I looked over at Father Michaels, who shook his head at me, as if speech were an impossibility.

“Nope,” I yelled.

“Perhaps he would like to open the bottle of wine?”

He nodded this time. He was still holding the bottle and had read the front and back labels several times, rotating the bottle again and again, making me wish I had something to read too. My mother left the salad she was tossing in order to hand me the corkscrew along with a scalding look. Working on the bottle, Father Michaels appeared to regain his composure. He thanked me for handing him the corkscrew and I felt like thanking him for thanking me. “Ever see one of these in action?” he said.

I hadn’t. The corkscrew’s presence in the utensil drawer had always perplexed me since it was the only item in there that was never used. Father Michaels used the pointed tip to cut the outer wrapping and expose the cork, which he then extracted so deftly I was surprised. His movements on the altar and even in the sacristy always seemed clumsy, as if he were remembering what he was supposed to do at the last second. No matter how many times he wore certain vestments, he could never seem to remember where the clasps were and would circle himself trying to locate them like a dog chasing his tail. I’d never seen anybody
remove a cork from a wine bottle before, but I doubted anybody could do it more gracefully.

He was examining the cork when my mother came in and said “Gentlemen?” She seemed to have regained her composure too.

When Father Michaels presented her with the bottle, he said, “I hope it doesn’t clash with what you’ve prepared,” and my mother laughed like that was about the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

All things considered, I thought dinner went quite well. Our small kitchen was overheated from the oven, but with the back and front doors open we got a breeze. My mother apologized for the casserole, but the priest wouldn’t hear of it, and pretended to read from the back of the wine bottle that it was a perfect complement to red meats, pasta dishes, and hot dog casseroles. He praised my mother’s oil and vinegar dressing, claiming that most people showed neither judgment nor restraint when it came to vinegar. I was given a small glass of wine. To everyone’s surprise, Father Michaels turned out to be a wonderful conversationalist and when he found his stride there was no need for anybody to talk who didn’t want to. He also stopped perspiring. He told us how he had worked as a waiter and busboy in a big New York hotel on vacations before entering the seminary. He had many interesting stories to tell, and listening to him you had to remind yourself that he was a priest. My mother must have had the same reaction, because after a couple glasses of wine she relaxed and even smiled over at me with something like her usual fondness. Before long, the casserole dish had been scraped clean and two lonely Bermuda onion rings swam in the bottom of the salad bowl. And then, as if the evening hadn’t been strange enough already, Father Michaels suggested I go outside and play ball against the side of the house while he talked with my excellent mother about some little matter of business. I hadn’t said two words during dinner, but I was still surprised to discover my friend considered my presence dispensible to the social equilibrium. My mother looked surprised too.

But I grabbed my mitt and rubber ball and went outside. The foundation of our house was stone and perfect for throwing grounders. There was only one more week of fifth grade, then a whole summer of I did not know what. I doubted you could just
catch grounders for three whole months. If my father had been around, we could have gotten Wussy and gone fishing, and that would have accounted for one day. As it was, I wondered what would become of me.

From where I threw the ball against the side of the house I could see diagonally in the kitchen window, but the late afternoon light reflected off it, and only the outline of Father Michaels’s back was visible. Occasionally, though, I heard my mother laugh.

And so the rectory became my second home, much to the satisfaction of everyone except the old Monsignor, who took no pleasure in having even such a quiet boy on the church grounds. My presence continued to surprise him when we encountered one another on the lawn between the rectory and the church, and I could tell that he would have liked to run me off the way he did the other boys who occasionally climbed the chain-link fence on a short cut to the ball field. I never caused him any trouble that I know of, but he always looked at me suspiciously, and if I happened to be carrying my rubber ball, he reminded me that stained glass windows were not cheaply replaced. It was clear that he did not think much of me, which was understandable enough, given the number of my confessions he’d heard. One of the things I liked best about Father Michaels was that after hearing people’s confessions he didn’t seem to think the worse of them. He heard mine a couple of times and didn’t treat me any differently afterwards. I preferred confessing to the old Monsignor though. My new friend was too nice a man to lie to.

On weekday mornings, after mass, we usually had breakfast in the high-ceilinged rectory dining room. I’d never seen so much food at a morning meal. At home, my mother had neither the
time nor the inclination to cook breakfast before going to work, so usually all I got was a sugar donut or buttered graham cracker. At the rectory, Mrs. Ambrosino, a widow of advancing middle age, who had cooked for the Monsignor since the death of her husband, brought on huge platters of food that filled the long rectory table. Except on Fridays, there were bacon and sausage, and sometimes ham, along with towers of toast, half a dozen eggs fried in butter, pitchers of juice and milk and bowls of fruit. You could have pancakes if you asked for them. There was so much food and so much of it went unconsumed that for a long time I was under the impression that company was anticipated which kept failing to show up. The old Monsignor, even before his health began to fail, had never been a prodigious eater, and most mornings he could be induced to eat little more than half a grapefruit, which contributed, in my opinion, to his sour disposition. That left the rest of the feast to Father Michaels and me. My friend ate like he did everything else, nervously, and I often felt that he would have eaten more and enjoyed it better if he’d felt entitled to it. But eating with genuine good appetite is no easy thing when you are seated at the opposite end of a long table from a man who makes it a point of moral significance to subsist on half a grapefruit, eaten in under a minute so that the bowl could be pushed emphatically away, another duty done. It’s not nearly so hard when you’re a boy seated halfway down the table, directly in front of the bacon and sausage and influenced more by aroma than moral statements. I ate like a dog.

“Ned,” my friend would say, using his cloth napkin to mop his forehead before placing it in the middle of his plate, “you’re a wonder.”

Mrs. Ambrosino apparently thought so too, though she derived no satisfaction from the fact that
somebody
was eating the food she prepared. As far as she was concerned, nobody counted but the old pastor. Father Michaels she ignored as if he did not exist, despite his repeated compliments on her cooking. She was not cooking for the handsome young interloper any more than for the urchin he had, for reasons known only to himself, allowed to invade the sanctity of the rectory. Everything she did was for
the
father, the old Monsignor, who had officiated at every important religious ceremony in her lifetime, the last being her husband’s funeral. She had not always been a religious woman, though she was one now. As a young woman she had lived with the man she
eventually married while they waited for his wife to oblige them by dying, which she eventually did. Mrs. Ambrosino had been wild then, as wild as any girl in Mohawk, uncontrollable in her passion for that awful woman’s husband, but when she finally got him the passion leaked away, and now her only passion was for the old priest’s health, which she equated with eating. “
Mangia
,” she implored him, hemming him in with platters of food, many of them rich delicacies searched out and ordered all the way from New York City to tempt him back to health. “Keep up your spirit.”

“Good Mrs. Ambrosino,” the old man responded. “It is not a question of spirit but of cholesterol. Your husband died of lasagne. An avoidable fate.”

As a matter of principle, however, the old priest had no objection to the overabundance of food, though he himself had no intention of eating it. A pastor for nearly forty years at Our Lady of Sorrows, he liked to keep up appearances. The rectory and church were freshly painted on alternate years, and a large part of the collection money went to upkeep. A full-time grounds-keeper was employed to tend carefully planted, cross-shaped flower beds on the main lawn, and the hedges and weeping willows were kept manicured. In the autumn, leaves were raked every day, and when people came to mass on Sundays in October they often remarked that leaves knew better than to fall where they were not allowed. The Monsignor considered himself both a good priest and a successful one, and he enjoyed the idea of a well-stocked table, in contrast to which his meager grapefruit might be fully appreciated.

After breakfast the old priest usually retired and Father Michaels often had visits to make in the community. As often as not, I was left to my own devices. The grounds within the chain-link boundaries of Our Lady of Sorrows were extensive and lovely. There were several trees that I yearned to climb, but I knew that such deviant behavior would have been frowned on by the Monsignor, whose tolerance of my mere presence seemed precarious enough. A stand of tall pines along the back fence behind the church provided cool, dark shade, and most days I sat beneath them on a blanket of pine needles reading about the wonderfully improbable adventures of two teenage boys on an island populated exclusively by the world’s foremost scientists, who were given to inventing things like ray guns that first got the boys into
and then out of trouble. Sometimes when he returned from his duties Father Michaels would join me and we would listen to the breeze high up in the pines and I would tell him what was new on Spindrift Island. “Ned,” he would say, “you’re a wonder. Who else would think to go around
back
of a church?”

In fact, my stand of pines was the coolest, prettiest part of the church grounds, and from the base of the trees you could look all the way up through the branches to the milk-white cross on the roof.

“This could be the coolest spot in all Mohawk County,” my friend said, and it was true, he sweated hardly at all when we relaxed there. “Only a boy would be clever enough to find such a spot.”

I didn’t see where it was all that clever, but I didn’t mind him saying so. I liked listening to Father Michaels talk, even though most of what he said was so odd I couldn’t figure out whether he was brilliant or simpleminded, though I feared the latter.

“People forget to notice beautiful things,” he said, looking up through the dark branches at the circle of blue-gray sky. “They outgrow it, I guess. A man who lives in a house on the beach forgets to look at the ocean. A man with a beautiful wife is just as likely to wander off someplace and forget her entirely. God must think we’re silly people.”

Then he added, “Except for you, Ned. You’re a wonder.” His favorite observation, the strongest evidence I had in favor of simplemindedness in my friend.

My only other companion that summer was the groundskeeper, a man called Skinny, who wasn’t particularly, though he may have been once. Now he had a melon under his white t-shirt. Skinny was in his forties, his stubbled chin a mixture of gray and black. He did not take to me until he learned I would not only do his work for him but thank him for the opportunity. I had a terrible yearning to feel useful, and Skinny, who had yearnings of the opposite nature, wasn’t the sort of man to let me suffer when there was something he could do about it. Of all his duties he most disliked mowing the great expanses of lawn, something the Monsignor wanted done every fifth or sixth day. To Skinny, a lawn didn’t look so scraggly that a sensible person would notice unless it went untended for a good two weeks. His basic philosophy was that mowing lawns was perverse and unreasonable behavior to
begin with, the proof of which lay in the fact that the grass grew right back again. He was not himself a religious man and had little good to say concerning people who saw God’s will in the everyday world, but if he
had
been the sort of man to see meaning in things, he would have concluded that God had never intended grass to be mowed. At least not by Skinny.

In the beginning I just helped with the trimming in spots the mower couldn’t negotiate. Especially in the cool moist shade along the sides of the church and rectory, where the grass grew thicker. Unfortunately, the hand shears I was given were designed for a full-grown hand. I made little progress and was unhappy with the task. What I really wanted was to run the big power mower. By happy coincidence, what Skinny really wanted was the shade and the hand shears, for he suffered mightily under the broiling sun, mopping sweat from his forehead with the stretched sleeves of his t-shirt until they were ribbed with brown.

“I don’t know,” he said dubiously, glancing at the rectory when I suggested we swap jobs. On the one hand, he didn’t want to be observed shirking his duties. On the other, he didn’t want to do them. This particular day he had a driving headache, and the very idea of starting the rattling engine of the power mower made him feel weak. There was a nice cool patch of ground on the far side of the church that needed his attention. It was well out of sight from the rectory and he kept a flask in the vicinity for company. He could even bring along the hand shears. “I don’t know,” he repeated, scratching his stubble.

We decided, predictably enough, on “just this once,” a phrase Skinny found so reassuring that the next time the grass needed mowing he used it again. Each time he pulled the mower out of the shed he handed it over to me “just this once” before disappearing. I liked both the mowing and the idea that the whole thing was more or less illicit. Some morning the old Monsignor would look out the window and catch me at it, and that would be the end. It didn’t happen though, and after a while I caught on to the fact that when the old priest went upstairs after breakfast it was to take a long nap that lasted until lunch. My friend Father Michaels caught me behind the mower one morning and looked startled. He began to shout something at me, but when I waved at him happily, he changed his mind. He watched me though, until he was sure I was in command of the situation, then waved
again and shouted something at me before getting in the parish station wagon and driving off. It looked like it might have been, “Ned, you’re a wonder.”