The Risk Pool (48 page)

“Folks,” my mother stage-whispered when the girl was gone. “Honestly.”

“She seems a pleasant enough girl,” F. William Peterson ventured. He had warned my mother earlier that The Elms had gone downhill since the new ownership, but seemed now intent on making the best of the situation.

“You know what you are?” my mother said.

F. William Peterson winked at me with more good humor than I could have mustered in the face of such a direct and potentially malicious question.

“A midwesterner,” she said. “And a midwesterner you will be until the day you die.”

Actually, F. William Peterson was from Pennsylvania, but this fact did not, to her mind, invalidate my mother’s point. He was from the western half of Pennsylvania, “practically Ohio,” and you couldn’t grow up that close to Ohio without
being
Ohio. Ohio
was that pervasive. Next to Iowa, she couldn’t think of a worse influence. And only a midwesterner wouldn’t object to the term “folks” so loosely applied.

“Do you think we can trust this midwesterner with our secret?” my mother said.

“Yes, certainly,” I said, trying to imagine what this secret might be. I’d been telling her lies all afternoon and there was no way to know which one she’d fastened on as “our secret.” Whichever, it was clearly her intention to use “our secret” to make certain that F. William Peterson understood his role as official outsider at our table. We were confidants, conspirators, she and I, and we might bring him partly up to speed if he behaved himself.

“With all the important research he’s involved with at the university, you must be wondering what Ned is
doing
here in Mohawk,” she said. “Even midwesterners have curiosities.”

In fact, F. William Peterson
did
look curious to discover what absurdity I had concocted to explain my sudden appearance in the middle of the spring term. So, there was nothing to do but repeat what I’d told her—that I was doing research in the concept of social hierarchy among primitive societies for my postthesis in cultural anthropology. For this reason I had arranged to become a bartender in backwater upstate New York, where I would take notes and interview the denizens of local gin mills without their knowledge. Later, the whole thing would be written up and published by a university press. I hadn’t decided which, yet, but we were leaning toward Stanford, where my major professor had friends. Actually, I only began this absurd story. After a few sentences my mother took it up, embellished its already pure fantasy, embraced it as purest truth. The designation of Mohawk as a primitive society she accepted without hesitation, having always believed this to be the case.

F. William Peterson nodded seriously. I think he may even have appreciated that the tale was not more absurd than it needed to be to explain my sudden appearance, my new employment, come Monday. When she was finished, F. William Peterson said, “Jesus,” almost reverentially.

When it came time to order, my mother said, “I know what
we’re
having,” as if to suggest that tradition, telepathy, and geography had put us in perfect synch, our nearly seven-year separation no reason to presume changes in taste. “A filet mignon,” she told our young waitress. “Need I say, medium rare?”

Not being telepathic, the girl looked grateful for this intelligence and even wrote it down. Then, mistaking our pecking order, she went the wrong way around and stood at the elbow of F. William Peterson. When he ordered the crab legs, my mother said, “Really?,” her voice rich with astonishment, as if he’d ordered a diet plate of cottage cheese and peaches. “Well, I suppose,” she went on, “if you actually
like
frozen fish.”

“I like crab legs,” F. William Peterson said.

Then the girl made her third mistake. “They’re frozen by law, ma’am,” she said.

My mother pointedly ignored her. “Oh, why not get something
good
,” she urged F. William Peterson. “This is a
special
evening. Don’t spoil it by trying to save a dollar.”

“I hadn’t meant to,” F. William Peterson said, and he then changed his order. A filet mignon, medium rare would be fine.

It made my mother happy. She took his hand and said, “There, Mr. Ohio, you’ll have a good dinner despite yourself.”

“Sir?” said the waitress, at my elbow now.

“Crab legs,” I told her. “I’ll have the frozen crab legs.” Then I added, to a mortified F. William Peterson, “We can share.”

My mother’s face registered nothing at first. Then it came apart, and the hand holding her second martini began to shake perceptibly. Finally, she too became aware of it. “If you two fine gentlemen will excuse me,” she said, pushing her chair back.

F. William Peterson jumped up to aid her, but she would have none of it. “Sit
down
, for heaven’s sake. You’d think we were at the Ritz,” she said, all too audibly. Then she spun on her heel.

She got halfway to the bar, then stopped in the geometric center of the dining room, where it must have occurred to her that she did not know where the ladies’ room was, that it could be anywhere, that she hadn’t a clue.

“Wouldn’t it be just scrumptious if tonight could last forever?” she said, less than forty-five minutes later.

We were drinking liqueurs and coffee. She had ordered an Amaretto and I’d said that sounded good to me, and F. William Peterson said him too, and we were a loving trio again. I’d ended up sharing my crabs legs with both F. William Peterson and my mother when her steak came well done. Normally, she’d have sent it back, but in the ladies’ room she’d rearranged things in her
mind and returned defiantly good-natured, claiming that the company of two such charming gentlemen was far more important than the way some old dead cow was prepared. She’d even admitted that she’d never eaten crab legs, that they had always seemed a lot of trouble, and that they tasted wonderful. Her newly discovered goodwill did not extend to our waitress, however, and she refused to believe there was such a thing as a law governing crab legs.

Sitting there sipping Amaretto, I remembered something I’d forgotten out in the desert—that things always worked better when my mother got her way. After all, there was nothing wrong with filet mignon. And there was nothing wrong with Amaretto. And if you thought you were going to enjoy something else even more, you were wrong, because she’d see to it that you didn’t. I hadn’t even tasted the crab legs. “There’s only one thing in life your mother wants,” my father had often remarked, “her own way.” And somehow now, I realized, I’d suddenly come to share his perverse unwillingness to
give
her her own way if it could possibly be avoided. I’d probably been doing it in little ways since I could remember, thwarting the will of this woman who derived so little pleasure out of life and seldom wanted more than the occasional public demonstration of loyalty and love, a small enough gift, since the gallery she was playing to was primarily in her own imagination.

And you had to admire her resiliency. Somewhere, probably in a private stall in the ladies’ room, she’d not only composed herself, convinced herself that things were not as bad as they’d seemed, refused my betrayal tragic significance, but actually talked herself into believing that the evening was everything she’d hoped it would be. Because by the time she told F. William Peterson that she wished our special evening would never end, she was telling simple, literal truth, her eyes so glazed over with emotion that it was impossible for her to see our slack-jawed amazement. The whole bloody mess could not have concluded soon enough to suit either of her charming male companions, but my mother had found peace, and she didn’t even object when F. William Peterson tipped the waitress as if he had recognized in her nervous demeanor his own long-lost illegitimate child.

My mother, who seldom left the house, and never drank at home, was none too steady by the time we returned to the flat, but she seemed to think that with my help she could negotiate the
back stairs, and she dismissed F. William Peterson at the curb with a vague promise of brunch the following morning. At the landing, she gave me her keys, all two of them, so that I could open the door. I was hoping she’d opt for bed right away, but instead she slipped into one of the dinette chairs in the kitchen and began to cry, her head on the table. When she finally looked up at me, her eyes were red and swollen. “Look at me,” she sniffled, “crying all over you your first night back.”

Actually, she wasn’t crying anywhere near me. I had pulled up the chair opposite her and waited.

“He’s such a good man,” my mother said. “How I
wish
I loved him.”

“He’s certainly crazy about you,” I said, trying to make carefully chosen words sound casual.

“I know,” she admitted. “It’s horrible.”

“It’s horrible that someone loves you?”

“Yes,” she said, looking off somewhere. “I want … my own true love.”

Her own true love. The outrageous simplicity, modesty, and arrogance of it took my breath away. It seemed to me, then and now, a wish that everyone had a right to, but that only the very foolish or the terminally naïve trouble themselves over.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not like this most of the time. Thank God for your grandfather.”

The remark took me off guard, though I should have seen what was coming.

“You don’t remember?” she said, her smile crooked, her eyes narrowing, as if at something nasty.

“No,” I said, but I had an idea.

“Mohawk Fair, Eat the Bird, and Winter,” she grinned.

“You forgot Fourth of July,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It’s just gone. Long, long gone.”

She got up then and went into her room, allowing the door to swing shut behind her. My guess was she’d be asleep in five minutes. I knew I wouldn’t.

Mike’s Place did a surprising daytime business. When I opened up at 7:30 in the morning, there were always several men waiting outside with the shakes and if I knew what was good for me I opened at 7:30 and not 7:31. They streamed in through the open doorway like ghosts in the early morning light, compromising my attempts to give the place a good airing out. Most of them were on their way to the shops and would be gone by eight, and only then would the stale beer and cigarette smoke and the smell of urinal cakes from the small rest rooms begin to dissipate in the crosscurrents. The fresher air brought talkative liquor salesmen and truck drivers making deliveries, bullshitters one and all, who drank coffee with a little pick-me-up in it and wanted to know about my love life. I could have told them about Marion, but I didn’t. I used the slack midmorning to swab down the bar and the dark, high-backed booths that lined one long wall from the front door to the end of the bar. At least once a week I took down all the bottles off the back bar and dusted, replacing the two dozen or so brands of whiskey that were seldom called, along with expensive vodkas, gins and liqueurs on top of the rings they’d left on the dark wood surface.

It took me a while to understand why I was not embraced enthusiastically by the salesmen and delivery men and the regular day crowd at Mike’s Place. I knew they’d been used to Satch, my predecessor, who had been unceremoniously canned to make room for me. Eventually, however, I discovered that the reason Satch was so much loved and missed was that he was the sort of fellow who hated to take money from guys he knew. The trouble was that Mike’s was the sort of place where after a week or two you knew everybody. Satch not only let the salesmen drink coffee for free, but he laced that coffee freely, and generally dispensed spirits as if he were heading up a nonprofit organization. According
to my father, whole hours would drift by with the place half full, its peaceful atmosphere never interrupted by the raucous ringing of the old cash register. And when it did ring, chances were it said “No Sale.” Satch and my father had pretty nearly got into it one afternoon when my father suggested the bartender use the drawer for something besides making change. Just what the hell was that supposed to mean, Satch wanted to know. He did pretty goddamn well by Mike. He treated Mike’s business like it was his own. Right, my father said. You put the money in your pocket. There must have been some truth to my father’s allegations because my first week behind the bar saw half as many customers and about twice as much profit.

Mike usually came in about the time the salesmen started arriving and left as soon as he’d signed what needed signing, just about the time his wife Irma arrived to cook for the lunch crowd. They passed each other silently, Mike giving her plenty of room. Rumor had it that they’d not spoken meaningfully since he’d lost the other restaurant, even though this more modest establishment, according to my father, did just about as well without half the aggravation. Be that as it may, Irma looked even meaner than I remembered her from The Elms. You could hear her muttering furiously and slinging pans in the tiny kitchen, and as the steam rose up from the big cauldrons she used to cook spaghetti, the sweat poured down her broad expanse of forehead from the roots of her now white hair, disappearing eventually into the stiff uniform she always wore to remind Mike how cruelly she was reduced since losing The Elms.

I gave Irma plenty of room until I discovered that she liked me. I could tell this from the occasional gestures of intimacy she offered me and no one else. Two or three times a day she emerged from her steam-bath kitchen for a soda, which I’d draw her in a larger tumbler full of ice. This she would accept, drain on the spot, and wait for me to refill it. This second glass she would take back into the kitchen with her, but not before looking around the place, nodding, nudging me with one of her big elbows, and saying, “Assholes!”

Though she took little enough pleasure in it, Irma made the best spaghetti sauce in town, and between twelve and one-thirty we jammed the place with the downtown lunch crowd that could afford a buck a plate more than Harry got for a hamburger and thick gravy-drenched fries. And, while nobody thought of tipping
at the Mohawk Grill, it was generally understood that you had to save at least a quarter for the girls who waited on the booths at Mike’s Place, one of whom turned out to be Eileen Littler. She worked three lunches a week for Mike, four or five evenings at a restaurant in the valley.