The Risk Pool (50 page)

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.”

“Okay, that’s one.”

“And at a restaurant, somewhere. You were with your father and he told a dirty joke.”

“And
I
wanted to die,” I said.

“I can’t remember the third time,” she finally admitted, her faint resemblance to her mother growing more pronounced when she frowned.

Since the third was her father’s funeral, and since it didn’t count because we’d not actually spoken, I said I didn’t remember either.

“Then how do you know there were three?”

“I don’t,” I said. “Maybe it was just two.”

“Then there’s no way I can win the prize. You don’t play fair.”

“I’m a scoundrel,” I conceded, mildly surprised that the “prize” concept had interested her.

“Who’s a scoundrel?” said Mrs. Ward, who had materialized at my shoulder carrying three more goblets, these full of fresh fruits, half of them new to me, all diced into bite-sized chunks. “Nobody is capable of being a scoundrel on such a glorious day as this,” Mrs. Ward said. “Simply glorious.”

I agreed. It was glorious.

“The first day of the rest of our lives,” Mrs. Ward continued, seating herself in the third chair. “I heard that somewhere and it stuck in my mind. That’s the way to look at this old life.”

“It certainly is,” I said.

“See?” Mrs. Ward said to her daughter. “You’re the only gloomy-gus at the table.”

“I’m not gloomy, Mother,” Tria said. “I’m simply a realist.”

“A
gloomy
realist. Thank heavens Mr.… is not a gloomy realist, or we wouldn’t be able to enjoy our brunch.”

We ate reverentially until Tria, as if to dispel the notion that she was gloomy, said that the kiwi was wonderful.

“It certainly is,” I said, making a mental note not to use this phrase again for at least half an hour, and wondering which of the fruits I was eating might be the kiwi.

There was a long moment then when we suddenly all seemed to realize that we might not be able to recapture the rhythm of normal conversation. We were on stage and somebody had missed a cue and now nobody knew whose turn it was to speak. Maybe the whole thing had been a bad idea, we all seemed to be thinking, as we dipped with renewed interest into our goblets, as if it were in the nature of kiwi and passion fruit to save us.

“A glorious day to be alive,” Mrs. Ward finally offered.

“It certainly is,” I said.

There was much more to eat, Mrs. Ward assured us. No, she didn’t need any help to fetch it. Tria and I watched her patter into the house, and I wondered what had become of their ill-tempered cook.

“How are you at saying no,” Tria said in a lowered voice, once we had the patio to ourselves.

I said it depended on who I was saying no to, almost adding that I didn’t think I’d have much luck saying no to her.

“Well, be prepared,” Tria said. “Because she’s working up to something.”

“What?” I said, genuinely curious as to what I possessed that Mrs. Ward could possibly want.

“I think I know, but I’m hoping I’m wrong,” she said. Then she reached across the table and touched my hand lightly, and only for a second. “Please don’t laugh at her though.”

Actually, thanks to the mimosas, I was feeling extraordinarily tolerant. Exactly one month earlier I’d hit bottom in Tucson, making a complete mess of my graduate studies, gambling compulsively, suicidally. And I had simply walked away from the mess. Now, sitting pleasantly on the Wards’ charmed little patio, with just enough breeze to flutter the umbrella overhead, surrounded by Skinny Donovan’s fragrant flowers, and in the company of a young woman every bit as fresh and fragrant as the surrounding bloom, it seemed to me that life was extraordinarily forgiving. I felt lucky again and there was no Lanny Aguilar around to be pissed off by my good fortune. Vietnam itself seemed relegated to the television, without local ramification, as if a town that never got to participate in the good fortune of the fifties felt no need to suffer the tragedy of the seventies. I decided that as far as I was concerned, walking away was an underrated talent, probably genetic in origin. My father had written the book on walking away from things before I ever came along. Perhaps luck was his gift to me. If so, I was grateful. After all, I could just as easily have taken after my mother, who had never walked away from anything, who paid and paid, compound interest, the principal always outstanding. This legacy she herself had inherited from her own father, who had considered himself lucky to come home from the war riddled with malaria, to break even in the cold earth of Mohawk.

I wondered what my grandfather, who had made his peace with ill fortune, who had accepted winter with a capital W as the essence of human existence, would have thought about me, with my 348, with the even luckier temperament that might well have allowed me to walk north into Canada or south into Mexico if I had failed in the luck of the draw. Maybe he’d have been happy for my disposition. I’d been told often enough that he had little use for my father, and it was reasonable to assume that he’d have had a fair number of reservations about me. But his life and thought had come to me filtered through my mother, so there was no way to tell for sure. Any more than there was a way to tell
whether he had ever spent an enchanted afternoon such as this under a sun that promised summer with a capital
S
.

It was not truly summer though, and when a white cloud obscured the sun, the air was suddenly chill and we were forced inside, leaving behind the petrified remains of our eggs in hollandaise sauce. The room we adjourned to was the small, book-lined study where Jack Ward had deposited me and from which the horrible frizzy-haired woman had stolen
Gone with the Wind
. The room was exactly as I remembered it, the large mantel and many of the shelves sporting photographs, including the one of a young Hilda Ward in the company of the distinguished-looking man with thinning hair, another of Tria, I presumed, balancing uncomfortably on this same man’s knee. There had been no photographic evidence of Jack Ward’s existence in the room ten years ago and there wasn’t any now.

Tria watched me intently as her mother took down from the place of honor on the mantel the leatherbound volume that had attracted my attention as a boy. Mrs. Ward hesitated there at the altar before turning back to us, book in hand, and when she did her expression could only be described as religious. I half expected her to open the volume and begin to read aloud. Instead, she cleared her voice and said, “Mr. Hall. I wonder if you would be so good as to give us your professional opinion of this work. As an historian.”

“Like I said—” I began.

“And as a graduate of the university.” The book was between us now, occupying space that was neither the old woman’s nor mine. There was nothing I could do but reach out and take the book, and so when Tria nodded, I did. Even so, there was a moment when we both had a hold of the damned thing, and when I drew it toward me, as I imagined I was supposed to, I encountered resistance in the fierce old fingers that did not want to surrender it. They did though, eventually, causing us both a momentary loss of equilibrium.

Once I had the volume—
The History of Mohawk County from the Earliest Times to the Present
, by William Henry Smythe—it occurred to me that I hadn’t any idea what I was supposed to do with it. The way we were all facing each other in the middle of the small room gave the impression that I was expected to read it standing up, beginning to end, and render a judgment as soon as I’d finished. It seemed Mrs. Ward’s clear intention was to stand
there and watch me read it, gauging my opinion from the movement of my eyebrows. For this reason I was reluctant to open the volume, fearful of setting this chain of events in motion.