The Risk Pool
They never even minded when I opened the little unscreened window in the alcove, which provided a nice breeze until midday, just enough to lift the pages of whatever I happened to be reading. Until noon, even on the hottest days, my alcove was the coolest place in town. After that, the whole library became close and hot, and by midafternoon even the rotating fan did little to disturb the dead, heavy air. Both I and the bickering old men were gone by then, leaving one or two librarians there all by themselves until six when the library closed.
I read some good books that summer, along with a great many bad ones, and I liked them all. Off in my own retreat and my own world, I learned some important things. Sometimes I would take any book off any shelf and start reading, as much as twenty or thirty pages without understanding so much as a word, or imagining I didn’t, only to discover that if I came back to the same book and passage a few weeks later what it said would make sense and I’d realize I’d understood more than I thought. If I was feeling energetic, I’d look up words I didn’t know, but more often I’d be content to wait for the word to crop up again in another context, and by its second or third appearance I’d know what it meant. I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read.
Around noon, or shortly thereafter, I’d hop on my bike and head over to the diner, where lots of times there would be something going on. The place would get busy and Harry would let me wash dishes for an hour or so, then feed me. On Friday he’d slip me a five or ten, depending on how much I’d worked and eaten. He had a good mind for figuring out what I had coming. I saw lots of people I knew. Untemeyer was in between two-thirty and three, a dead time when Harry didn’t mind him sitting at the end of the counter and taking some action. Having him was good for business then, because the men who wandered in off the street to get a number down probably wouldn’t have otherwise, and sometimes they’d stay for coffee or a piece of pie if they thought it hadn’t been sitting in the case too long. Tree came in all the time too, though he never spoke to me unless I was with my father. My guess was he didn’t recognize me otherwise. According to my father, Tree still had the two biggest, ugliest women in Mohawk County on the line, and when I asked him if he was counting Irma, Mike’s wife, he said he was counting everybody. “You should see Tree’s wife,” my father said, but he wouldn’t go into detail. Less frequently, my old friend Wussy would amble in wearing the same formless fishing hat, alight with colorful, hand-tied flies, which he would detach and let me examine, especially if my father was around. He always made a big deal about not letting my father touch his tackle, claiming he couldn’t afford to waste hours tying a fly if all it was going to hook was Sam Hall’s ugly black thumb. Wussy must have done something besides fish, but I never knew what it was. During the spring and summer he sold trout he caught to the Holiday Inn out on the highway, along with one or two other local restaurants. Sometimes, if he had a good catch, he’d have a half a dozen smaller ones left over and give them to Harry, who’d grill them if you asked. “Five-fifty up at the Holiday,” Harry grumbled every time he served one of Wussy’s trout. For some reason Harry always viewed the Holiday Inn as his chief competition for the Mohawk restaurant dollar, and he could never see why people would spend the extra to go there. When they’d opened a year ago, he’d given them six months to go belly up. “Same friggin’ trout,” he insisted.
“They got backs on the chairs there,” my father explained from his stool at the counter. “You can lean back without falling on your ass.”
Harry snorted. “Give me the extra three bucks and I’ll stand behind you.”
“I could never be sure you wouldn’t let me go right to the deck.”
“That’s true,” Harry admitted.
“You ever think your business might improve if you worked on your personality?” said a man named John, one of the regulars I didn’t like.
“I do all right,” Harry barked. “I do all fuckin’ right.”
“And you only work eighty hours a week,” John said.
“What would I do in this fuckin’ town if I wasn’t working?” Harry wanted to know. “Go to the track. Chase married women. Fall off bar stools?”
“There you go,” somebody said.
“I wish somebody’d chase my wife,” John said. “I’d throw in a color TV if he caught her.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s a bum lay.”
“I didn’t think so,” my father said.
“Me either,” Wussy agreed.
It got pretty quiet then. John stirred his coffee thoughtfully. Under normal circumstances he would not have felt compelled to defend his wife’s honor, but he wasn’t used to having her reputation assailed by a mulatto. “In Mississippi a guy could get lynched for talking that way,” he said.
“This ain’t Mississippi?” Wussy said. “You coulda fooled me.”
Wussy, I learned years later, had something of a reputation as a back door man, though I have no idea if he ever did anything to earn it. “Somebody’s gonna whack his big black dick off one of these days,” John said when Wussy was gone.
“How do you know how big his dick is?” my father said. Everybody thought that was funny but John.
Sometimes, early in the morning, Skinny Donovan would be pacing outside the diner in the gray predawn light waiting for Harry to open. I’d see him from my bedroom window in the Accounting Department. The sound of my father peeing with the door open before he left for work always woke me. That summer he was working in Albany, an hour’s drive, and he always eased his bladder last thing before leaving. I kept my watch by the side of the bed to time him, because peeing was one of my father’s amazing talents. For quite a while forty-two seconds was the record, forty-two honest seconds from the instant his stream first hit the water full force (he never used the side of the bowl), until the noise ceased. I never counted the incidental plinks that resulted from shaking. Then one heroic morning he suddenly shattered his previous mark with a startling 55-second pee. I thought at first that I must have calculated wrong, but that’s what it was and I stand by it. At various times in my life—in restaurant and airport rest rooms—I’ve unobtrusively timed perfect strangers and have concluded that my father in his day was the stuff of legend.
I’d see Skinny always pacing in the deserted street below as if he had to do the same thing, but it was Harry’s strong black coffee he needed to face his day at Our Lady of Sorrows, where he continued to plant and tend floral crosses under the watchful eye of the old Monsignor, who was dying even more surely now than before, though no more rapidly. Mrs. Ambrosino still adamantly refused to allow Skinny inside the rectory, and he now looked upon those old days when we’d worked together as a golden age, and would grow quite nostalgic over their memory, having forgotten completely his deep resentment at my being accepted into the inner sanctum. Or maybe it was that he had forgiven me, quietly confident that I was unlikely to be accepted there any longer.
I had the long summer afternoons to myself. The library, the Accounting Department, and the Mohawk Grill were all too hot, so I usually spent the afternoon exploring on my bicycle. I biked everywhere—up to the Sacandaga Reservoir beaches, public and private, as well as to the marina, where I would stroll around like I owned the place, evaluating the speed boats and bikini-clad girls who greased themselves and lay on boat decks under the hot sun, oblivious to it and to my own hot orbs; free now of maternal restraints, I rode down to the Mohawk River, which rolled lazily east toward the Hudson, full of slow, murky sludge, a dead river back then, its banks encrusted with discarded cellophane and rusty pop cans.
I also explored the winding cart paths of the Mohawk Country Club, where the long rolling fairways, most of them, were broad, funnel-shaped and forgiving. Racing along the edge of the woods, I would occasionally jump a foursome of silver-haired women on some remote tee, flushing them almost into perpendicular flight, like aged quail left
behind by the flock in the general migration to Florida. Yes, I was perfectly ubiquitous that summer, present everywhere I had no business, mildly annoying as a breach of security, without giving any particular offense, or at least sufficient offense to warrant mobilizing the authorities, whoever they might have been. It struck me even back then how ill-equipped the Money People, as Drew Littler called them, were to keep away intruders (admirers, in my case). The more you had, it seemed to me, the larger your border that needed defending. At the country club, for instance, they could effectively keep interlopers off the first, ninth, tenth and eighteenth holes, but I owned the rest.
My favorite afternoon haunt was still Myrtle Park, and most afternoons I would stop there on my way home. From the embankment overlooking the abandoned shack and mounds of discarded Mohawk trash, I would stare across the treetops to the blue-green hilltop a mile away on the other side of the highway where Tria Ward lived with her father, a man who had so much money he couldn’t spend it all, no matter how hard he tried, and who was still glad, after so many years, not to be shot at. I thought about Jack Ward a lot, and the way he had slipped Mike that fifty so smooth that nobody had noticed but me, and I compared him to my own father, who always carried what money he had deep in his front trouser pocket, an unorganized wad of mixed denominations from which he peeled bills to slap on the bar when he sat down. He always left the money right where it was when he went to the men’s room, its duty to carve out a small personal space there, establish beyond question his right to return.
It seemed strange that he and Jack Ward had known each other as younger men, that they had awakened cold and wet in the same German forest, clutching machine guns, thinking about Mohawk and what their lives would be like in the unlikely event they made it home. Had they planned it all there in that dark forest? Had Jack Ward planned to marry the jewel house on the hill, the shiny Lincoln in the circular drive, the money he couldn’t spend? Had he planned to engender the dark-eyed, frightened-looking girl I wanted to teach how not to be afraid, a lesson I felt confident to convey, despite not having mastered it myself? And my own father. Had he planned things too? The long, bitter wars with my mother? The big, hollow third-floor Main Street apartment? The long days working on the road? A life where the principal diversions were endless parades to the post and daily number drawings? And what about me? He couldn’t have planned on me, I thought.
Having awakened in the Hürtgen Forest remained a bond between the two men even now, something with the power to draw them together for five quick minutes in a dark bar for the swift exchange of secrets, the quick acknowledgment of present realities (this is my daughter, this is my son), of past realities (are we lucky bastards or are we lucky bastards? what the hell were the odds we’d be in Mohawk sharing a beer in 1960?).
It was doubly odd that I spent so much time thinking about Jack Ward, because I always went up into Myrtle Park to think about Tria, with whom I now counted myself in love. The trouble I had was coming up with fantasy scenarios. How would I ever see her again? Where? Was it possible to infiltrate the private and parochial schools that were her future? Would my father and I be eating dinner at The Elms some night and, seeing Jack Ward and his lovely child in the doorway, wave them over to our table? And would they condescend to make a happy foursome, the Halls and the Wards, Jack and Sam to exchange war stories, Tria and Ned left to play footsie beneath the table?
The above story line was so rickety that I couldn’t hold its lovely focus, and as the summer progressed, I discovered that I couldn’t even remember exactly what Tria Ward had looked like—only that she had been more beautiful than any girl I had ever seen. Most annoying was the cruelty of my perversely selective memory. What kind of sense did it make for me to remember every expression and gesture of the father of the girl I loved, when her own beloved face became daily more vague, little more than an ill-defined value judgment? It didn’t matter. The white jewel house, shimmering magically in the afternoon sun, contained them both, and it was a long way away.
When he didn’t get waylaid, my father usually wheeled up in front of the Mohawk Grill around four-thirty in the afternoon. I tried to be there myself about that time, so I’d get some kind of idea what was on tap for the evening, whether he’d be around or not, always assuming he knew himself. Usually there would be somebody, or a couple of somebodies who’d intercept him between the curb and the door of the Mohawk Grill, sometimes to let him know about a game upstairs, or a sure thing at Aqueduct, or touch him for a quick five. But eventually he’d make it in, cuff me in the back of the head and say, “Well?” Then he’d want to get a number down and off we’d go in search of Untemeyer, after promising Harry we’d be back for dinner.
“You know that Schwartz kid?” he asked me one afternoon after our ritual greeting.
“Claude?” I said. I’d neither seen nor thought of him since school got out.
“His old man runs the factory out in Meco?”
I said that was the one.
“Tried to commit suicide this afternoon,” he said. “Hung himself, the crazy son of a bitch.”
A lunatic discussion ensued. Several people in the diner had heard of the event, or overheard somebody talking about it, just as they’d overheard my father’s mention of it to me.
“Schwartz,” somebody said. “Bernie Schwartz?”
“Bernie Schwartz is older than you. This was some kid.”
“Maybe it was Bernie’s kid,” the original speaker suggested.
“Bernie never had no kids and he never run no factory in Meco. Other than that, it could have been Bernie.”
Everybody laughed.
“It was Clyde Schwartz,” my father said, getting it wrong, but close. “Third Avenue they live, somewhere.”
“There’s no Jews on Third Avenue. My wife lives up on Third Avenue.”
“It’s Clyde Schwartz,” my father insisted. “And they live on Third Avenue, I’m telling you.”
“What’s he want to kill himself for if he owns a factory?”
“It’s not him, it’s his kid. Clean your ears.”
“The Schwartzes live on Division Street, all of them. Right by the west entrance to the park. Except for Randy over on Mill.”
The door opened and Skinny shuffled in, filthy and smelling of fertilizer from an afternoon in the Monsignor’s flower beds.
“Hey, Skineet,” my father hailed him. “Where does Clyde Schwartz live?”
“Third Avenue,” Skinny said, happy to be deferred to in this local matter. “He damn near cooked his own goose today.”
“Not him,” my father said. “His kid.”
“No, him is what I heard. Tried to string himself up from the ramada in his backyard.”
“From the what?”
“I heard it was the kid,” my father said, unsure of himself now.
“Couldn’t be,” Skinny said. “He tied a rope to the roof and jumped off the picnic table. Neighbor looked out the window and saw him standing there on his tiptoes, eyes all bugged out. When he didn’t wave back, she got suspicious. Old Lady Agajanian.”
“There’s no Agajanian on Third Avenue,” said the man whose wife lived there.
“Old Goddamn Lady Agajanian,” Skinny shouted, “you simple shit! On Third Avenue. Next to Claude Goddamn Schwartz.”
“Besides,” somebody said. “Your wife lives on Second Avenue.”
The man had to admit this was true. He’d forgot. His wife did live on Second Avenue.
“I heard it was the kid,” my father said.
“All right,” Skinny said. “You tell me how a kid’s gonna bend down the crossbeam on that ramada.”
“I’m just telling you what I heard,” my father said, throwing up his hands. “Some kid named Clyde Schwartz tried to kill himself is what I heard. Sue me.”
“I don’t want to sue you. But I’ll buy your dinner if you’re right.”
“I didn’t know there was any Jews living on Third Avenue,” said the man whose wife di
dn’t live there either.
“Hey,” my father shouted after me. “Where are you off to?”
The hospital was right around the corner and up the hill, but I pedaled over to Third Avenue instead. The neighborhood was so quiet that I thought at first that the whole thing had to be a mistake. The Claudes’ house looked deserted and their station wagon wasn’t in the drive, but on the other hand there were no police cars, no neighbors clustered on porches, no indication of anything amiss. But instead of turning around and heading back I got off my bike and walked it up the drive. I was staring at the bent, mangled crossbeam and the tipped-over barbecue, when a voice behind me said, “I remember you. The friend.”
There was an elderly woman standing in the shadows of her screened-in porch, her white face and hair close to the dark metal webbing. I’d seen her before, when I was a regular visitor at the Claudes. About the only thing I could remember about her was that in the middle of summer she always wore a fur coat when she came outside. She was looking past me at the bent, tilted ramada, as if she could still see the ghastly spectacle there, as if she might see nothing else for a long time. I felt sorry for her, because she was pretty old and she shouldn’t have had to see Claude Jr. staring at her the rest of her days.
That night my father and I stayed home and watched television. He didn’t try to make me talk, but I could feel him looking at me, frowning, puzzled, not that this was unusual. When he noticed me at all perplexity was the predictable result. Finally, when he couldn’t stand it any more, he cuffed me a good one.
“What,” I said.
“You ever try anything like that and I’ll kick your ass,” he said.
I didn’t know whether the threat of an ass-kicking was much of a deterrent to anyone contemplating suicide, but I appreciated the thought. Mostly, he was still pissed at Skinny, who had refused to pay up when it was confirmed that it wasn’t the father who’d tried to croak himself. “You was just as wrong,” Skinny claimed. “Clyde Schwartz, you said. There’s no such goddamn person even.”