The Risk Pool
As it turned out, my mother’s gradual physical decline was not the only proscribed subject between us. Since she never responded to any information I chose to impart about my father or our lives together, I gradually understood that I was not to communicate anything of that sort. Of course I knew enough not to tell her anything troubling. Even when she was in perfect health, she never had been the sort of person to whom you confessed riding motorcycles. But I soon discovered that even carefully selected anecdotes about my father, ones calculated (even fabricated) to suggest that our life together was normal and healthy, were deeply disturbing to her, and it took me a long time to realize that among the myriad torments my mother suffered alone in her room, having given me over to the dubious care of my father was the keenest and the most deeply rooted. Any reminder of his existence caused her eyes to go dull and dead, and she would look away, at the wall, at the drawn window shade, at nothing at all. I think that for the purposes of her day-to-day reality she had constructed some sort of fable to account for my absence. Probably I was supposed to be away at some posh private school, and therefore able to visit only on weekends. Whatever. I know she particularly liked hearing about my triumphs at school, and these I began to manufacture with some ingenuity. Rigid slavishness to the truth had never been one of my particular vices, and it was during this period that my mother’s and my relationship was entirely rewritten, grounded firmly in kind falsehoods. It would never change again. For the rest of our lives I would lie and she would believe me.
Once I got the hang of the fact that only lies gave her any measure of peace, I never told her the truth about anything again. I became a perfect son, creating what amounted to an alter ego for our own private edification, for I may as well confess that my lies were not completely altruistic, whether or not they had a salubrious effect on my mother. The worse my actual performances at school, the more glorious the academic achievements I reported to her. The more arrogant and aloof I became with regard to everything that happened at Nathan Littler Junior High, the greater stature I accepted in the totally fraudulent renderings I concocted for her. First, I became a member of the eighth grade council, then class president. I also became a case study in morality, returning examinations to my instructors who, out of understandable force of habit, had given me a perfect score when in fact I had achieved a mere 98.
I was telling my poor mother all of this during the same period that I began to make weekly raids into Klein’s Department Store, using my key to Rose’s salon, then the elevator down into the dark basement, where I pressed the hold button and took the stairwell up into the store. The store itself was nearly as black as the basement I emerged from, the only illumination that which streamed in at odd angles from the streetlamps outside. Sometimes I did not even know what I was stealing until I got it upstairs.
All that autumn, a Saturday morning at a time, I joined my mother in her murky bedroom and watched her decline, unable in any way to prevent it. By Thanksgiving, I was sure she was going to die.
14
In the beginning I never went into the Mohawk Grill except in the company of my father. It was one of a dozen or so places (along with the pool hall and Clausen’s Cigar Store, where magazines with bare-breasted women were displayed in plain sight), that had been on my mother’s list of proscribed places. I remember that when I was a small child we had always crossed the street rather than pass directly in front of these dubious establishments. They were located on opposite sides of Main, and we must have looked pretty funny tacking and veering, as if to avoid invisible obstacles. My mother disliked the sort of men that congregated in these doorways, though they spoke well of her, and loud enough so we could both hear, even as we were in full retreat. These men were fickle though, and they said much the same things to all passing women.
One of my father’s favorite anecdotes concerned a man called Waxy—I was introduced to him one Saturday afternoon in the Mohawk Grill—who had a fine eye for shapes. His favorite roost was the doorway of the pool hall on South Main, from which vantage point he could keep an eye on the action inside and out. “Get a load of this,” he would say out of the corner of his mouth when something worthwhile appeared on the horizon. He could isolate an exceptional set of knockers on a crowded street, then hone in and track them like radar. “Scope this,” he said one evening just as my father emerged from the pool hall. It took a minute, but my father located the object of Waxy’s fixed stare beneath the traffic light at The Four Corners. “It’s your wife, Wax,” my father said. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Waxy shook his head, gravely disappointed. “Too bad,” he said. “It had potential.”
After a few visits to the Mohawk Grill, I much preferred it to the lunch counter at the shabby Mohawk Woolworth’s which, it then occurred to me, wasn’t such a great deal. The food at the dime store looked all right in the bright pictures on the wall, but it was invariably disappointing on the plate. Usually, I contented myself with a hamburger and Coke, sixty cents total, but I yearned for one of the “Fabulous Woolworth Triple-Decker Club Sandwiches” depicted in Technicolor above the milk machine. These were extravagantly expensive—a dollar ten—and I never saw anybody order one. I wondered if such a sandwich could be eaten by one person. Lettuce, bacon, red tomato, cheese, and turkey spilled out everywhere. The sandwich was so full that toothpicks were required to hold it together.
After the second Sunday I cleaned for Rose, I brought a crisp five the next day to the Woolworth’s counter. The waitress regarded it suspiciously, feeling it carefully with her thumb and forefinger, before going over to the sandwich board. “What’s the matter?” she wanted to know when she set the club sandwich in front of me. I was staring alternately at the plate in front of me and the picture above the milk machine, trying to discover a discrepancy that would hold up. There was a fragmented bacon strip, a thin slice of greenish tomato, a thick, spotted spine of lettuce, even some gray turkey. “Toothpicks!” I said angrily. “I want my toothpicks!”
At the Mohawk Grill, Harry Saunders, the big ornery-looking cook, didn’t gyp you. In fact, for twenty-five cents he would fill a plate with hot, glistening french fries, and even ladle brown gravy over them if you asked him. They were a meal. People who ate at Harry’s didn’t go away starved. What’s more, it was a lively place, especially in the winter, when work in the mills slowed and half of Mohawk was on unemployment. My father usually quit construction in November when it got too cold to work comfortably out of doors. Some afternoons and most evenings there was a poker game up above the grill, and when I lost track of my father for a while I’d know where to find him. If he wasn’t at the Mohawk Grill there was usually somebody there who had seen him within the last few hours and knew where he was. If I needed to get in touch with him, I’d just go across the street and tell Harry, and then a couple hours later he’d turn up.
Lest it seem that I was neglected, I should point out that once I became known to the Mohawk Grill crowd, it was like having about two dozen more or less negligent fathers whose slender attentions and vague goodwill nevertheless added up. Tree was usually around when he wasn’t out visiting Alice, and my old friend Skinny Donovan, who had few duties at the rectory during the winter months, divided his time about equally between the pool hall, Greenie’s Tavern and the Mohawk Grill. He seemed pleased that I had fallen from grace at Our Lady of Sorrows, and I got the impression that life had become more tolerable there now that I wasn’t seated at the right hand of the fathers. There was a new assistant priest, apparently. An alright Irishman who wasn’t too good to share a belt from the flask. The Monsignor was still sick and dying, but strictly at his own pace.
The Mohawk Grill was also an educational place, and it was here that I learned to handicap horses. There was always a racing form lying around, and usually somebody willing to explain its intricacies to a novice. Around noon, Untemeyer, the bookie, came in and sat on the last stool at the counter and took whatever action there was, writing out small slips that disappe
ared into the baggy pockets of his black alpaca suit. “Don’t mean a goddamn thing,” he said of the racing form and its statistics. According to Untemeyer, the other factors that didn’t mean a goddamn thing were the jockeys, the track conditions, and the horse’s lineage. “What does mean something?” I innocently asked one day. “Nothing,” he grumbled. “Nothing means anything.”
I thought about that. “There’s no way to predict?”
He snorted. “There’s all kinds of ways. That’s the trouble. None of them work. How old do you think I am?”
I couldn’t tell how old Untemeyer was, but I knew he was pretty old. I said fifty and he snorted again. “Try sixty-six. Guess how much I’ve lost on the horses.”
“A lot?” I said. If he was that old, it had to be.
“Not a goddamn dime,” he said. “Guess how much I’ve bet.”
I was on to him. “Not a goddamn dime?”
“You’re smarter than your old man,” he said. “Course, you’re younger, too. You got all your dumb years ahead of you.”
Actually, when it came to the horses, my father was nobody’s fool, and he’d made Untemeyer uncomfortable more than once. Untemeyer was a poor man’s bookie who never took any really heavy action. In fact, most of the book he wrote was under the traditional two-dollar minimum wager. My father, who made good money working on the road, had nailed him with ten-dollar daily doubles on more than one occasion. This made the old bookie grumble pitifully, though my father’s long suit wasn’t sympathy for bookies. “I guess this means you’ll have to go out in the garden and dig up that strongbox,” he said.
“Footlocker, you mean,” somebody added.
“Footlocker, your ass. We’re talking about my retirement.”
“Retire from what?” my father said. “You haven’t worked a day in forty years.”
“As long as there’s Sam Halls around I don’t figure I’ll ever need to,” Untemeyer said. “And there’s another coming right behind you.”
That meant me. I was off in a corner studying the form, and suddenly everybody in the place was looking at me, including my father, who nodded knowingly.
Sometimes we studied the racing form together, and he’d tell me why my selection was wrong. “Class will tell,” was his favorite reason. He had a hell of a time convincing me that the fastest horse wouldn’t necessarily be the winner. In the beginning I just scanned the columns looking for the fastest six-furlong times. “Forget that,” my father advised. “For one thing, this isn’t a six-furlong race. And for another.…” There were about half a dozen “for anothers.” He taught me how to look at how much the horse cost, his sire, and whether he was moving up, and perhaps out, of his class. My father wasn’t a big believer in betting jockeys, because the horses were carrying them, not the other way around. He liked fast, well-bred, expensive horses with a fondness for the rail.
Betting the horses is not something I advocate, but there is a great deal to be said in defense of handicapping, and I have often thought, and occasionally argued with people who considered themselves educators, that courses in handicapping should be required, like composition and Western civilization, in our universities. For sheer complexity, there’s nothing like a horse race, excepting life itself, and keeping the myriad factors in balanced consideration is fine mental training, provided the student understands that even if he does this perfectly there is no guarantee of success. The scientific handicapper will never beat the horses (Untemeyer was correct, of course), but he will learn to be alert for subtleties that escape the less trained eye. To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at. Since my days in the Mohawk Grill, I have known many great handicappers, and not one has ever preceded an Ayatollah into battle or become a Born Again anything. The handicapper is a man of genuine faith and conviction: There will be another race in twenty minutes.
My father would have been a great handicapper but for one fatal weakness. Where many failed as a result of missing some important nuance, my father erred by making things more complex than they already were. When he was on a streak—and it was not all that unusual for him to hit three or even four races in a row—things would invariably go very bad, usually all at once. The problem was that after hitting three or four in a row, my father began to suspect that the true determining factor in the next race’s outcome was himself. Destiny was awaiting his wager. Yes, he was a skilled handicapper, but I think he sometimes believed that this skill merely opened some door to an inner sphere of far greater influence. He began to suspect that the race was being run for his exclusive entertainment and benefit, that an act of faith on his part—say a hundred-dollar wager—was all that was needed to rig the race.
At such times his expression became both fierce and distant. Neither I nor anyone else existed. And when he lost, finally and inevitably, he looked like a man turned away at the threshold, as if some fine promise had been made, then without explanation, welshed on. Sometimes, too, he appeared almost relieved, as if he wouldn’t have known what to do if the promise had been kept. Having been taken advantage of, he was reassured of his purpose, and he’d grin at me weakly then, as if to say he hoped I’d been paying attention.
15
The Sunday before Christmas I went next door to clean Rose’s as usual. My father, after that first time, never accompanied me. Rose made me a list of things that needed doing, and I checked each one off methodically. I also went through her black ledger to find out how she was doing. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas she set new records every week, though many of the entries were made in light pencil, others on slips stuffed carelessly into the crease of the binding.
On Mondays, usually late in the afternoon, Rose knocked on our door and handed me my pay. “Your father leaves you alone too much,” she often observed, as she craned her neck to see inside.
I shrugged. As a rule I didn’t mind being alone. I’d taken up reading with even more of a vengeance in the months since moving in with my father, making at least two trips to the library every week. I’d grown fond of being the only one in the vast, high-ceilinged apartment, and sometimes I pretended I was its sole proprietor, an illusion not all that difficult to sustain, given my father’s unpredictable comings and goings. Once he learned that I would not starve if he didn’t show up at mealtimes, he felt better about not showing up. He set up an account at the Mohawk Grill and told me to eat there when I didn’t have cash. Sometimes, he would disappear entirely for a day or two and then come back looking sheepish, though he never offered any explanation. I never worried much, because there was always somebody at the Mohawk Grill who knew where to find him if I needed him, and usually I forgot to need him. I had plenty of ready cash and a growing savings account, the existence of which nobody knew.
“Boys your age need guidance,” Rose went on. “Before long you’ll have some girl knocked up, and then where will you be?”
I felt like explaining to her that it wasn’t so simple. But she wasn’t the only one to worry mistakenly about my unsupervised life in the big apartment. The guys at the grill were always wanting to know if I was getting any, and saying that I better had be. “At your age I’d have gotten myself laid every night if I’d had a place,” Skinny was fond of observing. I had trouble imagining Skinny at twelve, much less his getting laid.
“You know how to protect yourself?” Rose wanted to know.
I nodded. Wild Bill Gaffney, the town derelict, who spoke gibberish, had on more than one occasion pressed me to accept a small package, the contents and purpose of which I divined only after removing the prophylactic and unrolling its unnecessarily long sleeve. At the moment I had three still in their sealed packages. Protection was my strong suit. I needed something to be protected from.
I was thinking about this very problem that Sunday morning before Christmas in Rose’s when I heard the heavy step on the stair outside. I’d left my father asleep on the sofa n
ext door, and when whoever it was on the stair stopped and pounded on our apartment door I heard him snort awake. Through the frosted glass of Rose’s rear door, I watched the dark shadow of our apartment door yawn inward and the figure before it disappear inside.
It was a little early on a Sunday morning for visitors. We had few enough in any season, and I wondered if this might be one of the men from the black sedan who had once been looking for my father. I shut down the vacuum cleaner and listened. The walls were flimsy and I could hear voices across the hall, but they were vague, like voices in a cave. I thought I heard my father say, “He’s next door,” but I couldn’t be sure. They were there for five minutes before the door opened and my father limped out into the hall in nothing but his shorts.
“Let that alone for now,” he said when he poked his mussed head in.
“I’m almost done,” I objected, certain now that the man was a policeman, that the items I had stolen from Klein’s Department Store had been missed, the unlocked door discovered, the correct inferences drawn. I must have gone very white.
“You can finish later. We gotta take a ride.”
To the police station, I thought, illogically, since that was only half a block away. I pulled the vacuum cleaner plug out of the wall and studied the floor, unwilling to move.