The Risk Pool

  “Why thank you, young man,” the old woman said when I had her upright and the door had swung shut again. “I think I’ll have a Manhattan.”

  So I got her settled in the booth nearest the door, made her a Manhattan under my father’s supervision, and brought it to her. For some reason, she looked familiar to me, though I didn’t see how she could be. She made no move to take off her old fur coat, though she did remove her hat, which had been knocked cockeyed by her assault on the door. Her gray hair was thin, but utterly wild, despite the half-dozen bobby pins arranged, as far as I could tell, randomly.

  “You’re him,” she said, staring up at me intently, “aren’t you.”

  “Why, yes,” I said. “I suppose I am.”

  “Well,” she said. “He’s still alive, though I’m sure I never would have expected it.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it,” I told her, still not making the connection. “Excuse me.”

  I went back to the bar.

  “Give her about twenty minutes,” my father said, “then make her another one. Did she have money on the table?”

  I said yes.

  “Sometimes she forgets,” he said.

  In a few minutes I went back to see how she was doing. “I think I’ll have another Manhattan,” she said, as if the idea had just occurred to her. She handed me the empty glass.

  Twice more this happened, and when I served her fourth, she instructed me to call a taxi. The dispatcher seemed to be expecting the call. “Aw, fuck,” he said.

  A few minutes later the same driver pulled up out front and tooted. I got the old woman on my arm and together we negotiated the single step down to the sidewalk and then the curb. Again, the driver didn’t bother to get out. It took a minute, but eventually I got her situated comfortably enough in the backseat.

  “Make sure the towel’s under her,” the driver said.

  Oddly enough, there happened to be a ragged, dirty towel on the seat and the old woman was squarely in the center. It had begun to drizzle out and I was getting wet, but I took a moment for a word with the driver.

  “When you get her home,” I said quietly, “why not get off your fat lazy ass and give her a hand into the house.”

  He started to say something, but I held up a finger and wagged it, trying to look like a dangerous man. I must have, at least a little, because the words died in his mouth.

  Back inside, I was greeted by a powerful odor that I’d been only vaguely aware of when I’d helped the old woman out of her booth. My father and the other men at the bar were all grinning at me.

  “There’s plenty of t-towels in the back,” Tree said.

  In fact, the old woman had peed all over the booth and floor, just as she apparently did every Wednesday afternoon upon finishing her fourth Manhattan.

  But it was later that night, at home, when I sat straight up in bed. I’d been thinking about the cab driver I’d been too hard on, and the old woman’s good-natured way of letting other people clean up her mess, when I suddenly imagined a younger Mrs. Agajanian, standing on her screened-in back porch, watching my old friend Claude dangle, red-faced, from the bent crossbeam of the ramada.

  One Saturday afternoon in early May I ran into another old woman I’d known a decade before, and this one—Tria Ward’s mother—I recognized right away. The amazing thing was that she also recognized me.

  I didn’t work Saturdays, and I had agreed to meet my father at some unspecified time and place later that afternoon, whenever and wherever I managed to track him down. At the moment I was putting it off by picking up my mother’s anxiety pills (valium now) and a six-pack of Rolaids from a downtown pharmacy.

  I knew what was in store for me once I located my father. In the space of an hour I’d have three or four sweating beers lined up on the bar awaiting my attention. I’d have left home with every intention of being home for dinner with my mother, and for the first hour or two I’d consult my watch dutifully and warn my father that I’d have to leave soon, to which he’d reply, sure, absolutely, why not? But when the actual time approached, he’d say what’s the hurry, and by then that would seem to me a valid question. I’d try to figure out what my hurry was and not be able to. What had been my idea, to go home and not disappoint my mother, would suddenly seem like her idea, and I would resent her attempts to control my life. As soon as I finished this one beer I was on, I’d call and tell her the score, and if she didn’t like it, tough. But by the time I thought of calling again, there wouldn’t be much point, because afternoon would have merged with evening, and she would not only have eaten, but cleared the dishes and stacked them in the small cupboard above the sink.

  By the time my father and I thought of eating it would be late, just about the time Irma would have the kitchen closed up in Mike’s Place. Probably she’d have her coat on and be ready to leave when we shambled in, my father demanding veal and peppers, the Saturday special. She’d tell my father to go screw himself, and my father would say, Irma, Irma, let’s sneak back in the kitchen, get away from your husband. When he emerged five or ten minutes later he’d have two steaming plates full of veal and peppers that we’d perhaps pay for, perhaps not, depending on whether anybody remembered to ask us to and whether we remembered ourselves. And then we’d be ready for the rest of the night.

  This was the inevitable scenario I was trying to postpone by doing errands for my mother when I ran into Mrs. Ward at the prescription window at the drugstore.

  “Forgive me,” she said, after our eyes had met and I had looked away, not wanting to force the issue of our having been just about half acquainted so long ago. “But aren’t you my daughter Tria’s young friend?”

  The answer to that seemed more no than yes, but I decided to go along. “Mrs. Ward?” I smiled. “It’s nice to see you.”

  “I’m told you’re a graduate of the university,” she said, as if there were only one university in the country.

  I admitted it was true, adding that I was taking a break from graduate school and wondering vaguely how she would have heard any report concerning me.

  “And you are studying what?” she said, with the kind of forthright, almost insulting directness, you sometimes encounter in persons who are not merely curious but, for some reason, believe they have a right to know all about you. And, as is usually the case with such people, you gratify their curiosity and only regret doing so later. I told her I was studying anthropology.

  “Why, that’s practically the same thing, you know,” she said, looking up at me.

  I said I supposed it was, then asked what it was the same as.

  “Why history, of course,” she said.

  “Of course.” I blinked.

  “Why don’t you join us for brunch in the morning?” she said suddenly. “Say about one?”

  “One in the morning?”

  “In the afternoon, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said. One in the afternoon, tomorrow morning. I’d be there.

  “Say hello to Tria, won’t you?” Mrs. Ward said, when we’d both paid for our prescriptions.

  I looked around. Except for ourselves and the pharmacist and the young cashier, the store was empty. I didn’t know who the cashier was, but I knew she wasn’t Tria Ward. I wondered if Tria had become invisible, like Mrs. Agajanian’s son, the fish cleaner.

  “And she is …”

  “In the car, of course. Out front,” Mrs. Ward said. “I don’t drive, you see. The driving of automobiles has never been among my skills.”

  I had forgotten this, and I think I would have asked her, had I been the sort of person who believed I had a right to know, precisely what the tiny woman considered her skills to be. Instead, I followed her outside to where a canary-yellow Chevette sat in a tow zone right in front of the pharmacy. Mrs. Ward started speaking even before she had the door open, which meant that the first few words had to have been lost on her daughter. “Look who I have just discovered!”

  Tria—she was still quite beautiful, lon
g dark hair halfway down her back—leaned forward over the steering wheel to look, first at me, then to see if there was someone else.

  “You don’t recognize your old compatriot, Mr.…”

  “Hall,” I supplied.

  “Mr. Hall,” Mrs. Ward verified.

  “Oh … yes,” Tria said and smiled almost charmingly enough to mask the fact that she had not the slightest recollection of me.

  “I’ve invited Mr. Hall to brunch with us in the morning,” she said, getting into the small front seat with some difficulty. “Mr. Hall is an historian.”

  “Actually—” I began.

  “And a graduate of the university,” she continued. “What we need is some informed opinion … some light on the subject … some illumination, you see.”

  Tria didn’t look like she had much faith in the concept, or perhaps in my ability to deliver.

  “Tomorrow morning then, Mr.…?

  “Right,” I said. “Around one.”

  I was pleased to see, when Tria pulled away from the curb, that driving was now among her skills. It certainly hadn’t been the last time I’d seen her. She yanked the Chevette into traffic and turned at the corner with such authority that her mother grabbed the top of her head, as if to prevent an invisible hat from flying out the window. It seemed to me that Tria Ward might be angry at something. Maybe even something to do with me.

  The next day I was pretty glad that morning did not arrive at the Wards’ house until afternoon. F. William Peterson came over to the flat around eleven, and I heard him and my mother talking in subdued tones in the living room. My mother was of the opinion that I had spent the previous evening dazzling the dull local beauties. I never told her when I was planning to hook up with my father, of course. He always offered to come by and pick me up, but I said no, that I’d find him, and he understood well enough.

  “Well hello there, Mr. Debonair,” my mother said, when I finally dragged myself out of bed. She and F. William Peterson were drinking coffee on the same end of the sofa. “Do you know what momentous decision we’ve just arrived at?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “Brunch,” she said. “Corn bread muffins and sausage links.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, wondering what momentous decision they’d have arrived at if F. William Peterson had been allowed a say. “I hope you won’t mind me taking a rain check.”

  She gave me the tragic wounded look I expected, but, to my surprise, her face lit up when I said I’d been invited to brunch at the Wards’. “Ah!” she said. “Old line!”

  I frowned.

  “Well, not Jack Ward, of course. He was as plebeian as the next fellow, but his wife was a Smythe, one of the first families of Mohawk County,” she said. “Strictly old line.”

  “It’s a wonderful opportunity,” I said.

  “And Jack Ward cut quite a figure when he came back from overseas,” she remembered. “You should have seen him and your father in uniform.…”

  She stared off dreamily.

  “Take my car if you like,” F. William Peterson suggested.

  I had intended to take my father’s, since I knew where he kept the spare key to the Cadillac and since he probably wouldn’t be wanting it until midafternoon anyway. He and Wussy had dropped me off when the bars closed and said they were going home. I’m sure they did, eventually. The convertible was probably out in front of my father’s, but then again, it might be in one of half a dozen other places. So I closed the bathroom door on my mother’s frying sausage, shaved and showered, put on the only decent sweater I owned over a pair of khakis and drove F. William Peterson’s New Yorker out to the highway and up the narrow road that wound up through the trees to the Ward house.

  Seeing it again was a shock, so much so that I stopped the New Yorker just outside the stone pillars that marked the entrance to the circular drive and just sat. The white jewel house was little more than a big, fancy ranch of the sort that sat side by side, awaiting mature foliage, in the better Tucson housing developments. It was not nearly as nice as the house of the English professor whose house I’d played poker in the night before I left the city. And in the decade since I’d laid eyes on it, the Ward house had taken on a grayish tinge, as if it had suddenly begun to absorb the sunlight it had once so brilliantly reflected. The only improvement I could see was that the place was now surrounded by flowers—bright tulips and mums, along with some other exotic blooms I didn’t recognize. I’d no sooner pulled up and turned off the ignition when the explanation came slinking into view from around the corner of the house in a pair of gray work pants with dirty knees.

  “Hello, Skinny,” I said, stopping him in his tracks. Somebody had told me that the old Monsignor had finally died, like he’d been promising to do for so many years, and that the new pastor had had no more use for flowers than alcoholic gardeners. I’m sure I never expected him to turn up here though.

  It was pretty clear he hadn’t been expecting me either, because he glowered at me suspiciously, as if he’d already divined the truth of the matter—that for the second time in a life that was far too short, I had been invited into a house that was strictly off limits to himself. To make matters worse, he suspected that I was to be fed.

  “Nice car,” he said, eyeing the New Yorker and looking as if he wasn’t sure he was permitted to touch its exterior. When I got out, he looked inside. Then he stood erect and looked around. “Where’s Sammy?”

  “In the trunk,” I said.

  He looked at the trunk. It was big enough to contain my father. “Bullshit,” he said finally.

  “You got me,” I admitted. “Nice tulips.”

  He looked at them suspiciously, as if he suspected sarcasm. “You wouldn’t have a cigarette?”

  I didn’t, but F. William Peterson had left a pack on the front seat, so I offered him one of those.

  “Salems,” he said, and spit. He took one though, and lit up, his yellow hands shaking badly. His face was jaundiced too, now that I looked.

  “Take a puff,” I said. “It’s springtime.”

  “It’s already fuckin’ springtime,” he said. “Where you been?”

  I shrugged, as if to suggest I didn’t know quite where. I didn’t know how to summarize ten years, at least not for Skinny Donovan. Besides, I wasn’t quite sure he’d noticed that I’d been away. “I’m tending bar at Mike’s Place right now.”

  “How come your father don’t get you on the road with him? Damn good pay, is what I hear.”

  “You have to be in the union,” I told him. “Besides, it’s ball-breaking work.”

  “I could do it,” he said angrily. “I work three jobs right now.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Bet your ass. All three don’t pay what Sammy makes.”

  I said I was sorry to hear it.

  “And I could use the money,” he repeated, as if this were the principal consideration. He’d never needed the money before and now he did, so it followed that something would just have to be worked out.

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “This isn’t my car by the way.”

  He looked relieved to learn it.

  “I might say something to your old man,” he said, eyeing me still.

  “Couldn’t hurt,” I said.

  “Sammy’s the best,” he said. “He’d do it for me if I asked him. He’d give me his own job if I asked him. We’re like this.” He held up crossed fingers.

  The front door opened then and Tria appeared. I waved.

  Skinny looked in the general direction of the girl, but appeared not to see her. “I might not even ask him,” he said. “But he’d do it.”

  The Salem was down to its filter, but Skinny sucked away at it, as if it were not smoke entering his yellow lungs, but myriad possibilities. “I might ask him,” he said. “I might.”

  We ate outdoors on a small patio off the back of the house. It had a southeastern exposure, and the early May sun had some real summer warmth to it for the
first time. The gentle wooded foothills of the Adirondacks fell away to the south all the way to the Mohawk River, which was invisible but hinted at by the weaving black ribbon of distant trees. Or maybe it wasn’t the river at all, but something else that threaded its way, shadowlike, across the gentle landscape.

  “Mother will join us shortly,” Tria Ward said when we were seated at the white canopied table, which sported a pitcher of orange juice and a sweating bottle of chilled champagne. Tria looked almost too lovely in a fresh, summery dress tied at pale bare shoulders by spaghetti-thin straps. It made me wonder why she’d want to look so splendid to entertain a virtual stranger, one invited by her mother, no less. I decided her closet was full of equally enchanting dresses, and that she was wearing, in all probability, her least favorite. I was grateful for her beauty anyway, and when she leaned over to pour champagne and orange juice into my goblet I was more grateful still.

  “Do the mimosas, dear,” Mrs. Ward’s voice sang from the open kitchen window. “I do hope Mr.… likes mimosas.”

  Mr.… had never had a mimosa before, but he discovered he liked them quite a lot. The first few sips did what the handful of aspirin he’d swallowed before leaving his mother’s had failed to do.

  “I’m so sorry I didn’t remember you yesterday,” Tria Ward said. “I did by the time we got home.”

  “I was pretty crushed,” I admitted. “After all, you did promise to marry me.”

  Her eyes got very large, and I could tell she was struggling with the possibility that this absurdity might be true. “What?” she said, clearly ready to apologize for having forgotten this too.

  I smiled to let her off the hook.

  “You’re joking,” she said.

  “Actually, yes,” I said. “I think we’ve only met on three occasions. Name all three and win a prize.”

  “One is easy. The afternoon I backed my father’s car into the woods and we all had to walk up here. I wanted to die.”