The Risk Pool (69 page)

But the days when not much got past him were gone, as I discovered with respect to Alan Taggart, who was one of the semiregulars in Trip’s and who was so obviously a dealer that I was astonished that my father hadn’t tumbled to the fact. Unless of course he had, and simply wasn’t sharing the knowledge with me. He’d always considered me a bit slow, permanently impaired by my mother’s ethics and my early days as an altar boy. But I don’t think this was the case, at least with regard to Alan Taggart, whose wealth my father had explained to me as having been inherited. The reason I’m so certain on this point is that one afternoon, after I’d walked in on a bathroom transaction, Smooth asked me not to mention it to my father. “He’s death on recreational narcotics,” Smooth explained conspiratorially, as if this were the one fault he could find with my father’s otherwise sterling character.

What concerned me most about my father’s new friends, though they may have been, as he said, “all good guys,” according to the rather amorphous standards by which good guys are credentialed,
was that I suspected that he was drawn to them not so much because they were mildly disreputable, which would have been in character, as because they were all successful. He had never buddied with lawyers, contractors, and real estate people before, and he seemed to be discovering, late in life, that he enjoyed the company of men whose manners and dress and wit would have made him feel awkward or even inadequate when he was younger. I remembered with some embarrassment the way he had behaved around Jack Ward, with whom he had served in the war, where social distinctions disappeared under the constant assault of threatened annihilation and the absolute need for competence. There was nothing like fear to make democracy real. But my father must have learned almost immediately after returning from Germany that the democracy he had fought to preserve was class-riddled. His attempts at jovial camaraderie with Jack Ward, as I now recalled them, had been closer to obsequious fawning.

Nor was this all. I often suspected that another motive in cultivating these new friends was myself. My father introduced each new person who came into Trip’s according to his profession—pediatrician, insurance salesman, chiropractor (he held no grudge against the chiropractor who had failed to cure his lung cancer), dentist. His son was a professional and, therefore, must be provided with professional acquaintances during his visits. Five years earlier, such behavior would have been entirely out of character for my father, who went into his lawyer diatribe, the one he’d so often directed against F. William Peterson, at the slightest provocation. But no more. How could he, with Boyle seated two stools down, and Sam Hall the only working stiff in the joint.

When we got downtown, my father parked Smooth’s Lincoln across from the Mohawk Grill (Smooth had his office two doors down, on Main) and we crossed the street. The diner was the only establishment the length of the street that was open, but for some reason a young woman was coming toward us from the direction of the Four Corners. She was pushing an unhappy infant in a tattered stroller and had two small grubby children in tow. At first I did not recognize Claude Schwartz’s wife, though she had not changed significantly in either looks or expression.

When I stopped to say hello—I wouldn’t have, except I feared she had recognized me too—my father went on into the diner, leaving the two of us in the street with the crying infant and the two quiet, staring, older children.

“You know what he done,” the girl said, as if she meant to suggest that Claude, in abandoning them, had been acting on my explicit instructions.

I said I had heard and felt myself flush, perhaps because of the fact that if Claude
had
asked my opinion, I might very well have given this counsel.

“I knew he wasn’t no good,” she said. “His own mother says so. He caught me on the rebound or it never would have happened.”

I resisted the impulse to ask her what she had been on the rebound from, for she was, I’m sorry to say, the most physically repulsive young woman I’d ever met, the kind any sensible man would flee from before he’d made any sad-eyed, hopeful kids to be drawn along in her awful wake.

“You ever see the weasel, do me a favor and give him a message for me,” she began, but I held up my hand and said that I wasn’t so great about remembering messages and that I doubted I’d be running into Claude.

Inside, my father had already ordered by the time I slid onto the stool next to him. “Who’s she?” he wanted to know. When I told him, he nodded. “How’d you like to wake up next to that for the rest of your life?”

For some reason, despite my aversion to her, I felt an odd impulse to defend Lisa Schwartz, though I didn’t know why or even how. And when Harry came over and asked me what I wanted, I didn’t know the answer to that either.

During the long months of my father’s chemotherapy, I made no mention to him of Leigh’s pregnancy. If he thought it strange that she never came with me to Mohawk, he never said so. After all, he had just the small one-bedroom, and the couch I slept on in the living room was not a convertible sofa, like all the old Sam Hall couches had been. He may even have concluded that my visits were selfishly motivated. Most of the men he knew—indeed, most of the men he’d known all his life—had learned to prefer the company of men after they were married, and many of them had elevated to an art form the process of not going home until they were good and ready. Whenever the phone rang behind the bar in Mohawk gin mills, a motley chorus—“I’m not here,” “I left ten minutes ago,” “You ain’t seen me in weeks”—went up along the bar. It’s entirely possible that my father interpreted my always
arriving alone as evidence that I was training Leigh right, the way he wished he’d trained my mother.

And, in fact, there
was
an element of selfishness to my frequent weekends in Mohawk. Leigh and I did fairly well during the week. She was still working and she headed uptown early in the morning, leaving the apartment quietly, so as not to wake me. I habitually read late into the night, rose late in the morning, arriving uptown in time for luncheon meetings with writers and marketing people and other editors. Then I typically worked at the office until nine or ten at night, when Leigh and I would share a late supper, the day’s anecdotes and outrages, and, even now, frequently, our bed. The crowded day was what Leigh seemed to need, and I missed her far too much during that day to spend what little time we had in the evenings quarreling.

Weekends were different, though. I looked forward to them, but they almost never turned out well. With forty-eight uninterrupted hours before us, it always seemed to me that Leigh might be persuaded to change her mind by Monday morning. She must have feared the same thing, because come Friday evening she’d grow more distant, superficially affectionate, it seemed to me, without opening herself to the possibility of real passion. During the week, when she knew I wasn’t foolish enough to think I could alter her resolve in an hour or two, she’d kiss me open-mouthed, drawing me eagerly toward our bed where she would receive and return my affections almost desperately, but Saturday night always found her more playful than loving, and her lips were then dry and cool. When I suggested we go someplace for the weekend, she always said, “Not a chance, pal. You think I don’t know what you’re up to?”

In fact, it was often Leigh who encouraged me to visit my father in Mohawk as an alternative to the certain unpleasantness of a weekend in the city, where every suggestion I made—a movie, dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, even some jazz on the stereo—was likely to be interpreted as my crossing over some invisible boundary she had staked out without telling me. “I don’t see why you have to act this way,” I told her. “You’re behaving like a seventeen-year-old playing virgin the morning after. You’ve already given me all there is to give. This holding back, this pretending you don’t love me when it suits your purpose is plain silly.”

I shared exactly none of this with my father, of course. There
were plenty of things in the world that he was pretty shrewd about, but he was even more helpless and confused around women than I. Neither my mother nor Eileen had been exactly complicated, but he’d shaken his head over the two of them as if comprehending what they wanted from him required a minute understanding of astrophysics. Perhaps Leigh was not so much more complex, but she seemed so to me, and I wasn’t about to betray my confusion to a man who could only deepen it, not when he seemed to believe I had things pretty well in hand.

And so, every other weekend, or every third one, depending on his condition after the most recent treatments and how well he’d recovered from their debilitating effects, I went to Mohawk to see my father. Miraculously, throughout the strong chemotherapy, he kept most of his wiry hair, though he claimed his shower drain was full every day. The third or fourth day after his treatment he’d start eating again, even if it was only an apple at first, his appetite improving daily until it was time to go back to the hospital. Sometimes, in the middle of a meal, however, he would break out in a cold sweat and begin to shake. The cure for that was a cold beer. He couldn’t stand the taste of the first one, but after that he’d be all right. He was under strict orders not to drink, of course, but he said that half the time he neither drank nor wanted to. Besides, beer wasn’t really drinking anyway. According to his doctors, the tumor on his lung was shrinking, and that was the main thing. “You can’t give up every damn thing and still call it living, right?” he said, nudging me. Then, when I didn’t respond, “Right?”

“Whatever,” I told him.

Then he’d put his thin arm on the bar, hand open. “Wanna arm-wrestle?”

“No.”

“Good,” he said. “This arm is about the only thing I got that still works, and it’d be just like you to break it.”

“Your mouth still works,” I said.

He decided to ignore me. “Besides,” he went on, “if I ever beat you, it’d be pretty embarrassing, getting your ass kicked by a man with about two weeks to live.”

The Christmas holidays found me in New York by myself. Leigh flew to Colorado to be with her mother, who was living alone in
the large family house, Leigh’s father having divorced her and remarried two years before, relocating in Seattle. I had known for some time that her father was part of what was not right between us. She’d been even more devastated than her mother to learn that for many years he had carried on a secret affair with a woman known to both her mother and herself, and who had often been a guest in their home. Leigh’s own husband had been a good deal less discreet in his philandering, and I think she gave far less thought to him and what he’d done to her directly than to her father and his indirect breach of faith. The old man had not only fooled her but shaken her faith in her own judgment at a time when she could have used a little reinforcement. (The revelations of her husband’s and her father’s betrayals had virtually coincided.) New York was not the best place in which to search for lost faith.

I hated to see her go to Colorado for the holidays because I was very afraid she would not come back. She and her mother, who had never been close, were lately drawn together by the similarity of their misfortune—their status as victims—and I feared that the older woman’s resignation and withdrawal, however understandable, would attract Leigh as a posture for coping. She had begun to talk of quitting her job instead of taking the maternity leave she was entitled to, and going someplace where you could breath the air. The morning I accompanied her to La Guardia I began to prepare myself for the phone call that seemed inevitable. Her voice would be more distant than Colorado when she assured me that I wouldn’t have to do anything, that she’d already called the mover, that a date had been fixed for the van if I would just gather her things in some out-of-the-way place so they could be got at. I wouldn’t even have to miss work.

This was the call I was expecting when the phone rang and my father’s voice, much closer than Colorado, crackled on the line. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to be home. How come you aren’t visiting your mother?”

“Because she lives in California,” I said. “That and about a hundred other reasons.”

“I know a few of them,” he said. “You want to run up for a day or two?”

I didn’t, really. The cumulative effect of my recent weekends in Mohawk, as well as of leaving my mind there when I returned to the city, was that I was behind in my work. With the city shut
down for the holidays, I had thought to get caught up. At least a little.

“I could,” I told my father. “Maybe the week between Christmas and New Year’s, if that’s all right.” I was already thinking of possible excuses to use later to put the visit off until after the first of the year.

“Doesn’t matter now,” he said. “I’m all done.”

My chest knotted up like a fist. “What do you mean?”

“No more,” he said, as if he imagined that this equally ambiguous phrase cleared matters up. When I didn’t say anything, he finally added, “I’m cured. You don’t have to act so surprised. I never promised to die. I just figured I would, that’s all.”

I still couldn’t find words. The last time I’d spoken to him he had been discouraged. The size of the tumor had been reduced, but he had lost another five pounds, his blood count was off, his skin even more jaundiced. His doctor had balled him out too, told him to get serious, that he could only safely administer two more treatments without ensuring the destruction of all his healthy organs. He had to start eating whether he felt like it or not. Eat and exercise and nothing else, or it was all for nothing.

“The tumor’s shrunk?” I finally managed.

“Not shrunk” he said. “Gone.”

“That’s astonishing.”

“That’s what I said. I said are you sure you got the right chart, Doc. I’m a sick man. He said not anymore. Showed me the X ray and everything. Last couple treatments did the trick, apparently. I’m clean as a whistle. He says go home and don’t smoke and you might live to be a hundred.”

Right then, I think I believed he would. Almost incredibly, it seemed he had beaten the odds again. If Sam Hall had a specialty, that was it. I remembered the rack of pool he’d shot against the skinny kid in the thin t-shirt, coaxing his far superior opponent into a scratch off the eight. Then there was the afternoon he had arm-wrestled Drew Littler on the kitchen table, putting all two hundred and fifty pounds of raw youth flat on his back. Not to mention Normandy, the survival of which was surely the greatest trick of all. What other name was there for it? Not luck. Not skill. Not even craft, exactly, because craft was something you could call upon routinely, whereas my father was able to summon whatever it was that he sometimes summoned only when the situation was seemingly hopeless. Only then could he be counted on to find
the combination. I remembered his old promise to Eileen, that he’d outlive everybody and bury her under Nathan Littler’s obelisk.