The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  “Eat my what,” Eileen said, offering her first half-smile of the day. She’d been in an uncharacteristically black mood all day, and we’d talked her into coming at the last minute to take her mind off things. Drew had been released from jail earlier that afternoon. Eileen had been waiting for him to turn up so she could read him the riot act, lay down a whole new set of ground rules for as long as he lived under her roof. But he’d apparently seen that coming, and now she feared he’d be in trouble all over again before she could even lay down the law. Since that was a distinct possibility, she’d dispatched my father to look for him in the dives he was known to frequent, the only consequence of which was that by five o’clock my father was half loaded and no longer anxious to find Drew Littler, if indeed he ever had been.

  I had surprised my father by asking if I could go along to the viewing. That morning I’d awakened feeling better about things and I spit-shined my cordovan shoes and even ironed one of my white dress-up shirts. We always had our dirty clothes washed and folded at the laundry around the corner, but we did our own ironing when being wrinkled wasn’t acceptable. For me that was practically never. Today was different, though. After I bathed, I tried half a dozen new styles while my hair was soaking wet and would go where the comb said. Once dry of course it would do what it wanted, but it was fun to imagine having hair like James Dean or Elvis. They wouldn’t have worn a white shirt with gold cufflinks and matching tie clasp, but I had to admit I didn’t look too bad all spiffed up, my big ears not withstanding. The only problem was my blue blazer, which I hadn’t worn in many months and which turned out to be too tight. When she’d purchased it a little over two years ago, my mother was insistent that there be “room to grow,” and she wasn’t content until she found one that hung limp, its sleeves down over the second knuckle. Now, no matter how I tugged at them, those same sleeves were up over my wrist and my shoulders strained the seam down the back. Still, I concluded, as I sat impatiently in the backseat of the convertible, my fingernails were clean and I looked good enough to court a girl at her father’s wake.

  “Anyway,” Eileen said to my father, “you finally got around to wearing the cologne I got you for Christmas.” He was inching toward the center of the narrow road, apparently contemplating passing the long line of cars that snaked around a blind curve in the woods.

  “What?” he said, after thinking better of it and drifting back. Then they both turned around and looked at me.

  I shrugged.

  “At least it’s not going to waste,” she sighed.

  “Stay downwind of the casket,” my father said. “You don’t want to start Jack sneezing.”

  By the time we got within sight of the Ward house, night had fallen. Cars lined the long circular drive on both sides and were parked all over the lawn both inside and outside the stone pillars, which were themselves nearly a hundred yards from the house. In fact, cars were parked all the way down to the edge of the trees where Drew and I had parked the motorcycle and watched the house until Jack Ward came out on the patio to watch us.

  I was reminded again of Drew’s strange vow to one day own the white jewel house, and it gave me a chill to realize that even so small an obstacle to his doing so had now been removed. After all, if Jack Ward, who had everything, could lose it all, including his life, on the back nine of the Mohawk Country Club, then wasn’t it possible that the wheel of fortune could spin in the other direction? What if when we got inside we discovered Drew Littler all dressed up and standing next to Tria Ward in the receiving line, holding her hand by way of comfort? For a dreadful instant it seemed plausible. The Ward house was one of the few places my father hadn’t looked for him.

  The more I thought about it, I had to smile, even though my own chances of ingratiating myself into the affections of Tria Ward and her mother were not appreciably better. I was a little smarter than Drew Littler, maybe, and a little less of a social liability, a lot less belligerent and aggressive. I could say I knew who my father was, the advantage of which was not clear-cut, it seemed to me. If pure luck—indeed some rather extravagant manifestation of it—did not intervene, Drew Littler and I would probably share a common, very common, destiny. But I feared fortune just the same, even if it was more likely to intervene on my humble behalf than Drew Littler’s.

  “I wouldn’t park here,” Eileen said when my father turned off the lights and the ignition. We were half on the shoulder, half on the pavement.

  “That’s interesting,” my father said, getting out.

  One of the reasons Eileen wouldn’t have parked there was that the car was right up against a bush, which made it impossible to get out the passenger side.

  “Come on, Slick,” my father said to me, letting his own door swing shut.

  Once I was out, there was nothing for Eileen to do but slide across the seat and get out on my father’s side. “The trouble with my life,” she said, “is that it’s too goddamn full of gallantry.”

  There was a bottleneck of about fifty people at the front door, patiently waiting to get in. It occurred to me then, perhaps for the first time, that what the white jewel house had meant to me as I looked at it from the hill across the highway in Myrtle Park it also meant to most of Mohawk County. And when the modest obituary in the Mohawk Republican announced that friends of the deceased would be received at the Ward home, it had been seen as an invitation to the entire county to tour the house they’d seen from the highway and wondered about for decades. They couldn’t have been more delighted for the opportunity without having been informed that the event was to be catered, which in fact it turned out to be.

  “I’ve got to find a phone,” Eileen said, consulting her watch when we joined the throng on the patio awaiting admittance. “I was supposed to be at work fifteen minutes ago.”

  But nobody was coming out of the Ward house, and those on the patio looked like they were settling in for a long siege. Everyone was in excellent spirits, however, and these were not the least dampened at the prospect of having to cool their heels or by the general solemnity of the occasion. Rumors circulated that there was food inside, which seemed only right. Jack Ward had been Irish, and many took that to mean there’d be booze as well.

  “You might have worn a jacket at least,” Eileen said to my father, who was in fact the only man on the patio not wearing one. Something about the way she said it made me notice the way she herself was dressed. Normally I wouldn’t have paid any attention to the floral print dress she was wearing, except that she was standing among women more quietly and expensively dressed. My mother, even on her limited budget, had always dressed well, and I discovered that I could tell the difference between good taste and bad, at least when they conveniently rubbed shoulders for the sake of comparison. Eileen was looking at the other women too, I could tell, and the regret in her eyes, which seemed to encompass more than just the cheap dress she was wearing, made me feel sorry for her. “I wish I hadn’t let you talk me into this,” she told my father. “Do you cry at funerals?” she asked me, as if she thought she might cry herself and would have appreciated the company.

  “The way everybody’s standing around,” my father remarked, apparently oblivious to Eileen, “you’d think this place had only one door.”

  I followed, but refused to believe he actually intended to slip in the back. As we weaved our way through the swelling crowd, I overheard one man say, “There. At least somebody’s leaving.” Blessedly, nobody followed us. Around back we found the caterer’s truck parked by the open kitchen door. We went in.

  Mrs. Petrie, the Ward cook, who had once pegged me for a thief and encouraged me to swipe parfaits from the freezer, was there, dressed in a light blue uniform that might have fit her once but didn’t any more. The kitchen looked like a battlefield, and she was sitting contentedly amid the casualties, smoking a cigarette. It was the biggest kitchen I’d ever seen, but every inch of counter space was stacked with dirty plates and large oval serving trays. From outside the kitchen came the d
in of conversation, and it was clear that Mrs. Petrie had retired from it. There were half a dozen serving trays on the island loaded with hors d’oeuvres and ready to go, but you could see from the woman’s posture that they were going to stay right where they were. She had not seen us come in, and it would not have mattered if she had.

  My father went up behind Mrs. Petrie and began massaging her shoulders. “Sam Hall,” she said, looking straight up at him. “I was just wondering how things could get worse.”

  “Be nice, Tilly,” my father said.

  “I am nice,” Mrs. Petrie said, blowing smoke up at him. “I’m the nicest person you know. I’m fifty-three and I never shot anybody yet, including my husband, who deserves it. Including her, too,” she added, gesturing toward the noise outside. “It would never occur to her that I might be having a hard time serving five hundred freeloaders all by myself.”

  “This hasn’t exactly been the best day of her life either,” my father pointed out.

  “You sure?”

  “It’s her husband …” my father began.

  “And now she’s rid of him,” Mrs. Petrie said.

  “Tilly …”

  “Sam …”

  She saw me then, and Eileen, too. “I got a ratchet jaw, don’t I,” she mumbled.

  “Mind if we use the phone?” my father said. There was one hanging on the wall.

  “Not a bit. Dial 0 for the Philippines.”

  While Eileen called The Elms, my father sampled something brown on a cracker off one of the serving trays and handed an identical one to me. I made the mistake of stuffing the whole thing in my mouth before tasting it. My father was grinning at me. “You want people to go away, I’d trot these right out there, Tilly.”

  “Don’t blame me. It’s catered all the way from Schenectady. Too important a shindig to trust to me.”

  In as much as I still hadn’t swallowed, my father handed me a cocktail napkin. I used it, too.

  “There,” Eileen said, hanging up the phone. “I got the night off.”

  Then, to everyone’s surprise, she shouldered one of the serving trays full of hors d’oeuvres and disappeared out into the noisy foyer. My father and I looked at each other.

  “Where’s the caterer?” my father said to Mrs. Petrie, who remained parked and unshamed.

  “Stretched out drunk in the front seat of his truck,” Mrs. Petrie said, stubbing out her cigarette. “I may join him.”

  “Well,” my father said, taking a deep breath and cuffing me one in the back of the head. “Let’s go see my old buddy Jack.”

  * * *

  It was a while before we saw him, though. The casket stood along one wall of the long living room and the line of people waiting to pass before it snaked around like the welfare line down at the unemployment building on the first of the month. The first person we ran into was Wussy, who I discovered, to my surprise, was half bald. I’d never seen him without his fishing hat before, and he looked like he wished he had it on now, along with his old chinos and flannel shirt, instead of the plaid sport coat and tie. The coat fit him about as well as mine fit me. “Pretty spiffy, Sam’s Kid,” he said to me. Then to my father. “Nice turnout.”

  “Jack had friends, all right,” my father said. “I didn’t know you were one.”

  There was something a little wrong with the way my father said it, but if Wussy noticed, he didn’t let on. “What’s with Eileen?” he said, having spotted her across the room, returning to the kitchen now with the empty tray.

  “Reflex,” my father said. “Or something.” It was clear he didn’t think much of this particular reflex, if that’s what it was. Not that there was anything he could do about it. “You seen Zero today?”

  “Nope,” Wussy said. “Heard they cut him loose. No reason to keep him. Wasn’t no white boys he put in the hospital.”

  “You know how it goes,” my father said.

  “That’s right.”

  “There were four of them, you know.”

  “And they were where they weren’t supposed to be to begin with, right?”

  My father raised his eyebrows and shrugged, as if to say, You tell me.

  Tree was there too and he came over and joined us. He’d been standing next to a woman so big that at first I’d thought it was Alice from The Lookout, but when she turned around I saw it wasn’t. “Nice crowd,” Tree said, then to Wussy, “Y-y-you a friend of Jack’s?”

  Wussy didn’t say anything. After a minute he drifted away.

  “Nice going,” my father said.

  “W-what,” Tree said.

  “Nice going, that’s all.”

  “W-what’s he doing here?”

  “What’re you doing here?”

  “Don’t get t-t-touchy, Sammy.”

  “R-r-right,” my father said.

  Eileen came by and Tree took an assortment of hors d’oeuvres, balancing them halfway up his arm. My father and I watched the expression on his face as he chewed the first one.

  “Now what’re you going to do with the others?” my father said.

  Tree looked around desperately for a place.

  My father took a couple, popped one in his mouth. “You never had pâté, you rube?”

  “I should’ve known. If it looks like sh … it and smells like sh … it, it must be—”

  “Right,” my father said, munching the other.

  “I’ll just give this last one to M-marge,” Tree said, obviously pleased to have remembered her.

  “She looks hungry,” my father admitted.

  We watched him return to where the huge woman was standing all by herself, elbow to elbow with strangers, nobody to talk to. She looked pleased and relieved by Tree’s return, as if she’d half expected to be ignored the rest of the evening. She accepted the cracker and chewed on it daintily, not at all offended. Tree shrugged at us across the room.

  I could not take my eyes off the big woman, who continued to eat the cracker as if she doubted it would be her lot in life ever again to eat anything so delicious.

  After a while I slipped away. As usual, my father knew everybody. Eventually he would notice I was gone, but we had an understanding about that. I could be gone all I wanted, provided I was back by the time he was ready to go someplace else. And gauging when that might be ready wasn’t as tough as you might think. He had a rhythm to him. In bars I could tell, within a minute or two, when he’d get up to go to the men’s room, when he’d figure it was time to beat me in a game of shufflebowl. Now, I could tell just by looking at him that he’d be pretty content for a while.

  Somebody had opened the door to the library, where Jack Ward had left me on my previous visit, and people had spilled in there to escape the crush. Only now that room was crowded too, if not quite as noisy as the big foyer. A large man knelt in front of the big console television, as if he were contemplating turning the set on so he could compare its picture with his own. Nearby, a frizzy-haired woman removed a leatherbound volume from one of the tall oak bookcases, glanced around the room, and slipped it into her big bag. Then she noticed me, and when I didn’t look away, she checked again to make sure nobody was watching, and replaced the book. When the man kneeling in front of the TV straightened up, he and the frizzy-haired woman left the room together, though not before she located me again and narrowed her eyes at me murderously. Out of curiosity I went over to the bookcase to find out what she’d wanted so badly, because I’d never seen anybody steal a book before. This one was a fancy movie edition of Gone with the Wind, which explained it.

  I wandered. There were other people I knew in the crowd. Rose, her orange hair in a shockingly tall beehive, looked right at me and away again. She’d never seen me all spit-shined before, so I couldn’t blame her for not recognizing me. Just inside the living room doorway, the old Monsignor sat in a high-backed throne-shaped chair, Mrs. Ambrosino, soberly resplendent in a billowy dress, in attendance at his side, rather pointedly refusing hors d’oeuvres on his behalf, well in advance of t
he old man’s actually seeing a single offering. I steered clear.

  Then F. William Peterson materialized at my elbow and drew me aside like a conspirator, looking excited and flushed. “You’ll be home in the morning?” he wanted to know. I said probably, and that seemed to please him. He had just a thin tuft of baby-fine hair on top now, and it stood on end. “Great things,” he whispered. “You wait.”

  After a while I joined the line filing slowly toward and past Jack Ward’s casket. He was dressed the way I remembered him, in a white suit with a pale pink sweater, slender and graceful even in death. I refused to think of him as a comic figure on the terrace of the Mohawk Country Club, his trousers down around his knees. I promised myself I would never laugh at the story when it was recounted at the diner, for it surely would be, for a long time to come. Maybe, I thought, even if I never amounted to anything, it would be enough not to be the sort of man who’d tell the story of Jack Ward’s final round for laughs.

  There was no way to tell by looking at Hilda Ward whether she’d been spared the details of her husband’s death. Even smaller than I remembered, the tiny woman gave no hint of grief or loss, and I thought of what Mrs. Petrie had said in the kitchen about her being rid of him. I also remembered the way she’d treated him the afternoon Tria had backed his Lincoln into the woods. Tria stood next to her mother now, her dark eyes full, and she was so lovely I felt a dull ache in my chest. Her face was the color of her father’s fine suit, and she could not take her eyes off him, even to receive condolences. Suddenly, I knew I could not face her, could not present myself to her. I left the line and the living room.

  My father was still talking to some people in the foyer, so I went back into the library, which had emptied out. For some reason, the first thing I saw was the small gap on one of the shelves across the room. I ran my fingers along the spines of the books, stopping at the space where the fancy Gone with the Wind had been. The horrible woman had come back for it.

  We dropped Eileen off and drove home.

  “What’d our friend want?” my father said when we were alone.