The Risk Pool (7 page)

Things looked up, however, when Our Lady of Sorrows was assigned a young priest named Father Michaels to relieve some of the burden of duties from our aging and allegedly infirm pastor. Though not a large man, the new priest was a very handsome one, with longish brown hair and dark eyes. His hands and fingers were slender, like a woman’s, and just as white. Otherwise, the only truly notable thing about him was that he perspired terribly in all weather. He had been with us only a few weeks when the old Monsignor ordered all new outer vestments, very costly ones that priests within a parish often share, and made a present of the old darkening ones to the embarrassed young priest. Father Michaels always carried a thick cloth handkerchief with him when he said mass, secreting it on the altar behind the Bible stand, a respectful distance from the holy tabernacle, using it several times during the course of proceedings to mop his glistening forehead and neck.

Father Michaels was very conscious of his perspiring, and on Sundays, when there were sometimes half a dozen irreverent altar boys on hand to remark the fact, he sweated even more profusely than during the week. When he distributed Communion, with me preceding him backward along the altar rail, gently inserting the gold communion paten beneath the urgent chins of the faithful in case their tongues did not accept cleanly the sacred host, the sweat actually dripped from the tip of the young priest’s nose, plinking onto the gold plate, like rain into a tin gutter.

We took to each other right off. Unlike the Monsignor, who was
always in the sacristy no matter how early I arrived and who managed to convey the impression that boys were undependable by nature and that he would probably have to do my work—lighting the candles, cleaning out the censer and making sure it contained a fresh lump of charcoal, toting the big red Bible up the pulpit steps—Father Michaels often blew into the sacristy through the side door ten minutes before mass was supposed to begin, blinking, tired, and mussed, as if he’d just been awakened in the middle of a nightmare.

“You’re the only one?” he said nervously the first morning I served the seven for him.

I said I was.

“Aren’t you a little young to be going solo?” he said, as if he hadn’t counted on himself to be there with me. I was by then a seasoned one-year veteran, and had to resist the temptation to remark that he too looked a little young for a solo flight.

Before leaving the shadowy sacristy for the bright altar, he always said, “I guess we’re all set then?” as if he couldn’t be sure without getting my educated opinion on the matter. I doubt mass would have been said that day had I professed uncertainty. But I never did, and so he took a deep breath and put his hand on my shoulder, the way a blind man grabs hold of someone he trusts not to lead him over any open manholes. He was complimentary of my bell ringing, my handling of the water and wine cruets, my lighting of the candles. “When Ned Hall lights a candle,” he often remarked, “it stays lit.” That might have been said for any candle lit by an altar boy, but it made me feel good anyway. After each successful mass, when the sacristy door closed behind us, Father Michaels acted like it was all my doing. “Ned, you’re a wonder. You’ll be pope someday.”

After we got comfortable with each other, he wanted to know about my father. The old Monsignor had probably told him a little, because the new priest already knew Sam Hall wasn’t around. It had been over three years since he left Mohawk, I assumed, for good. I never talked about my father with anybody, including my mother, and at first I felt awkward, but I soon learned that talking about him didn’t make me feel the way I had thought it would. After mass, Father Michaels and I often sat on the sacristy steps in the sun, and there I told him how I had lied about my father being dead, and about his nocturnal marauding, and about the fishing trip with him and Wussy, and how that
ended with my mother shooting the convertible. He laughed at the part about the fishhook in my father’s thumb, and I did too, though it had never seemed funny before. When I got to the shooting part, he went pale and wanted to know if I was exaggerating, as if it made him uncomfortable to think that one of his parishioners owned a gun, much less shot one. He had trouble associating the mother of my story with the quiet, pretty woman he’d seen in church who sometimes waited for me when mass was over.

Perhaps to make me feel better, he told me about his own father who had been a drunk and beaten him and his mother until his unexpected and highly unusual death. When he spoke about the man, his eyes became unfocused and distant. Apparently, when Father Michaels had been a year or two older than I, his father had had a vision which reformed him on the spot. At the time he had been on a bender for nearly two weeks, during which he had not been home, much to the relief of the boy and his mother, whose eyes he had blackened before leaving and which were still greenish yellow. When he finally returned one afternoon, his wife was prepared to leap from the third-story window if necessary, but though shaky, her husband was sober and dressed, unaccountably, in a new suit. He was shaved and combed, and he announced that he had returned to them a new man. He certainly looked like one. The boy and his mother scarcely recognized him. The bag of groceries he was carrying was welcome though, as was the news that he had a job, a good one. He then kissed his wife’s yellow eyes and asked his son if he would like to go to a ball game at the Polo Grounds while his mother prepared dinner. At the ballpark they drank sodas and watched the game from high in the stands, and Father Michaels remembered it as the happiest day of his young life.

When the game was over, the older man took his son’s hand and together they came down out of the stands. Father Michaels remembered the bright sun seemed to rest right on top of the opposite bleachers, and perhaps for that reason, his father thought they had reached the bottom when there was still one step to go. As a drunk, he had miraculously survived his share of dangerous falls. More than once he had missed the top step on the stairs outside their third-floor flat, unaware that he had done so until he discovered himself seated on the landing below. He had fallen off chairs, out of moving cars into gutters, off porches, off
bicycles, off ice skates, off countless bar stools, even off women. But that afternoon, when he was sober and full of new life and aching love for his long-neglected boy, his leg stiffened when he thought he had reached the bottom of the stadium stairs, and though he had misjudged where he was by inches, his leg shattered like a dry twig, the separated bone driving up into his groin. He immediately went into shock and died before the doctors at the hospital to which he was finally taken could diagnose the problem.

If Father Michaels had not explained the moral of the story, I would have missed it, for it seemed to me that the man’s mistake in judgment had been to sober up when his natural state was clearly an alcoholic trance. But my friend explained that God had generously given his father the opportunity to die in the state of grace, and to allow the two of them a wonderful afternoon and its memory. He went on to explain that his father’s memory probably had more to do with his becoming a priest than any other single factor. Even viewed thus providentially, God’s design, though unmistakable now that it was pointed out to me, appeared to me a trifle convoluted, though I was hardly an expert. It just seemed that if He wanted disciples, His method with Saint Paul on the Damascus road was cleaner since it involved just the man in question (unless you counted the horse), not the beating of the man’s wife or the prolonged torture of his son, or any other innocent bystander to effect the conversion. Nevertheless, Father Michaels and I were bound by mutual sympathy, and he was of the opinion that even if my own father never showed up again, he would very likely continue to shape my life. I should be thankful for him, and for the brief time I’d spent with him, even if he didn’t seem like so very much of a father.

My new friend also encouraged me to be thankful for my mother, whom he regarded as an extraordinary woman, not just as a gunfighter, but as someone of courage and endurance, who accepted what she couldn’t change, who did the work of both a mother and father, who did whatever was required of her without complaint. He could tell all this from the altar, just by looking at her, though she usually sat halfway between the vestibule and the altar in the darkest section of church beneath the fifth station of the cross. She never took Communion, a fact that was much puzzled over and commented on among the sparse congregation. Neither did she go to Confession. She was a contradiction, often
attending weekday morning masses, which were not required, without ever, to use the terminology of Sister Matilda Marie, who taught catechism, “partaking of the Mass, His Body, His Blood.” How odd she looked, now that I think back on those days, kneeling there in the nearly empty church, first light just painting the stained-glass windows, among the dozen or so elderly women with fleshy throats and gnarled fingers tracking noisy rosary beads. But my mother, I suppose, was also a widow of sorts.

I never gave her much thought until Father Michaels said what an extraordinary woman she was. I loved her, I suppose, but the way ten-year-olds love, arrogantly, aloofly, without much urgency. She was the constant in my life; she made sure I had clean underclothes in the top drawer of my dresser, that the meat in the freezer got defrosted in time for the dinner she would have to cook when she got home from the telephone company.

Father Michaels wanted to know all about our life together, so I told him, understanding only then in the telling just how unusual that life was. When I explained our daily routine, he guessed immediately my mother’s most pressing concern—the approaching summer. Something would have to be done with me when school let out. I was nearly old enough to be self-sufficient—to make my own sandwich at the noon hour—and nearly mature enough to be trusted. But not quite. Though quiet and studious and shy by nature, I was beginning to show signs that troubled my mother. I admired Elvis Presley, for instance. Especially his hair. Neither the man, his hair, nor his music seemed worthy of admiration to my mother, who forbade me to carry the slick black Ace comb in my hip pocket, the purpose of which was to subdue a stubborn un-Elvislike cowlick. No, I needed looking after. In the past we had relied on Aunt Rose for July and August, but this year she had hinted she might like to go away for the summer, explaining that she had not been out of Mohawk since the war. She’d seen pictures of the national parks out west that made her want to see them for real and find out if they could be so pretty in real life. My mother found the notion of Aunt Rose in Yellowstone ludicrous, but she knew what her cousin was trying to tell her. She didn’t want the responsibility for an eleven-year-old boy for an entire summer. Forty-five minutes a day was all right, because she could feed me coconut macaroons and turn on the television, but she couldn’t imagine how to keep a boy my age entertained during a whole summer. She loved children and
it was the great sorrow of her life that she hadn’t had any, but I wasn’t really a child anymore, and I certainly wasn’t
her
child.

One morning, Father Michaels suggested I introduce him to my mother. She had left immediately after mass, however, so as to be in time for her ride to work. It was only a few blocks to my school and I was used to walking them alone. So I suggested that Father Michaels come by that evening when she got home from work. He could have dinner with us if he liked.

By afternoon, of course, I had forgotten all about my unauthorized invitation, and we were just sitting down to a dinner of beans and hot dogs when a car pulled up outside. My mother feared all automobiles, because my father had one, though this was not his most effective distinguishing characteristic, since everyone we knew owned a car but us. Even Aunt Rose had a Ford. She never took it out of the garage, but she did have one. Still, not many cars pulled up in front of our house, and though no one in Mohawk had seen my father in years, my mother quickly got up from the table to make sure. She got into the living room just in time to see the young priest, his forehead glistening and a dark ring beneath each arm, getting out of the parish station wagon. He was carrying a bottle of wine.

I don’t know what my mother was most confused by—the fact that a priest was coming to visit, that he was carrying a bottle of wine, or that he hadn’t common sense enough to avoid dinner hour. It had been a warm day, and the heavy, inner door was already open so that the house could air, so there was just the screen between them when Father Michaels mounted the porch steps. When he saw my mother staring at the bottle of wine, he raised it timidly and said, “For purely sacramental purposes.”

This was a joke, but it confused my mother even more. She had made no move to open the door, but it was clear from the expectant way the man was standing there smiling at her that she was expected to. Surely this was no casual social call at such a time. Did the man intend to say mass in the living room? There was nothing to do but let him in.

My mother’s hesitance finally tipped my friend that something was amiss. “I hope I’m not late,” he said. “Ned didn’t say what time.”

They were both looking at me now. I’d started backing up when I saw who it was on the porch, but I was caught. I could feel myself flushing, but so was everybody else. My mother, no doubt
remembering the small beans-and-hot-dog casserole already steaming in the center of the kitchen table, looked homicidal, and I was glad the police had confiscated my grandfather’s revolver. Of the three of us, however, Father Michaels looked to be in the worst shape. He was not only red with embarrassment, he looked as if he might faint. Three distinct trails of perspiration disappeared into his collar.

My mother was first to rally, and she refused to hear of the priest leaving, though he expressed a fervent and sincere desire to. Instead, she got him to sit down on the sofa, and she left me, as she put it, to entertain our guest. I had no idea what that might entail. Father Michaels was too kind to say anything, but he wore the expression of a man cruelly betrayed by a trusted ally. We both stared at the floor and listened to the sounds emanating from the kitchen. I heard the casserole return to the oven and the sound of anxious, angry chopping on the drain board.