The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  If I missed my father, I did not miss his world. It felt good to know that I would not have to suffer another meal in Eileen Littler’s tiny kitchen. I didn’t have to see Drew Littler any more, or serve as reluctant witness to his violent lunacy. I considered myself well rid of the lot of them—Drew, Eileen, Skinny Donovan, Tree, even Harry and Wussy, both of whom I had actually imagined I liked, back when I was under my father’s dubious spell. I now lumped them all together as somehow responsible for my own degeneracy. But mostly I blamed my father, and blamed him most for not looking after me, for not seeing how low I was sinking or for not caring, for not seeing that I deserved better—that I was, if not a wonder, as my old friend Father Michaels had thought, at least a good boy.

  So I put him behind me. The only vestige of my father’s world that I allowed myself during those endless high school years in my mother’s cheerful flat was the pool table. My passion for the game took a long time to dissipate. For the first year I played just about every day, even in the cold of winter. Sometimes, down there in the garage, I would catch a glimpse of her white face framed by the small kitchen window upstairs, where she would watch and worry, as if she imagined he was down there with me, just out of sight along the blind wall, giving me quiet instructions.

  If I was seldom truthful with my mother, it must be said that she was seldom truthful with me either, though back then our most blatant lies took the shape of silences. It had not taken us long to intuit the rules of our new relationship. She would tell me nothing about what it had been like in the hospital or the nursing home, or that private inner place she lived for so long where no one could reach her. And in return, I would refrain from any reference to my life with my father—our routines, our habits, our activities. Those two years, she often suggested, were simply lost. Tragically lost. It had been a dark time for both of us, and now it was best forgotten. There was certainly no need to invoke it.

  She was all for pretending the chronological gap did not exist. Often, at night, when we were about ready to turn in and my mother had taken her final pill, she’d smile and take my hand. “It’s like we were never apart,” she’d say. “That’s the way it always is when people truly care about each other.” Her eyes would go dreamy and distant then, as if she weren’t talking to me, but some imaginary person. “No amount of time, no amount of distance … nothing matters when two people …”

  I always felt horrible when she said such things, though I knew that thinking them made her feel good and helped her get to sleep. Trouble was, after listening, I couldn’t get to sleep, because what she insisted on was so untrue it was frightening. The more she harped on what good friends we were, and how we knew each other’s thoughts so completely that speaking was unnecessary, the longer I stayed awake wondering what was wrong with her, what kind of blindness it was that kept her from seeing that the two years I’d lived with my father had changed everything. I wasn’t even a boy anymore, much less her boy. Every time she smiled and said we must take care never to lose that special thing we had, that rare ability to be completely honest with each other, it made me want to cry, because of course our rapport—that was one of her favorite words, rapport—was purely a figment of her imagination. I hadn’t the slightest intention of telling her anything but the most soothing lies I could invent.

  Most of the time we had nothing to say to each other at all. The long nights I’d spent alone in my father’s apartment had made me introspective, the world’s worst company, and there must have been times when she wondered what had become of the kid whose mouth had run nonstop from the moment she walked in the door from the telephone company, in need of a little peace. It probably would have charmed and eased her mind to hear me chatter again, and I think I would have if I could have thought of something to say.

  What seemed inevitable to me was that one day, probably one day soon, she would suffer another collapse and return to the hospital. By being a model son and avoiding truth and other natural upsets, I hoped only to delay that return as long as possible. In the beginning, I hoped for a year. When at the end of that period she was not only still intact but had actually gained some ground, I was glad but unconvinced, even though by then she had reduced her daily ration of libriums from four or five to three or four. She had also put on more weight and begun to look womanly again. Her hair, which had been cut short when she was in the home, grew out again, and she spent a long time each night, just before bed, brushing it out before the mirror in her bedroom. Sometimes, when the light was right, and she tilted her head a certain way, she looked more like a girl of nineteen than a woman sneaking up on forty.

  For her rejuvenation F. William Peterson deserved all the credit. Something about my mother had touched him long ago, maybe even that first afternoon she had come to see him, to get him to help with her divorce. At some juncture he must have realized that she was trouble, but he stuck with her. I don’t know how much of his own money and professional time he spent in the hospital and later in Schenectady. I’ve asked him about it more than once, but never gotten a straight answer, and I know now that I probably never will. That he visited her regularly I know. That he spent his own money I deeply suspect. By no means the worst lawyer in Mohawk, he seemed to profit as little as any of them. I know he paid dearly and dutifully to the wronged Mrs. Peterson until that good woman finally relented and married real money in the shape of a plumber from Amsterdam, but I think when the money from the sale of my mother’s little house began to evaporate he helped with the arrangements. As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, the night that my father caught him with a woman at The Elms must have been an anomaly in his behavior, symptomatic of the decline of his marriage, because from the moment my mother became the woman in his life, I’ve never known him to show the slightest interest in any other.

  In fact, F. William Peterson’s devotion to my mother bordered on the pitiful, especially given the trouble she’d caused him. Thanks to her he had been administered a thorough beating by my father, who seldom, over the years, missed an opportunity to promise another thrashing should the opportunity arise or the lawyer’s behavior warrant. I once counted nine separate public humiliations that Will, as my mother referred to him, suffered at the hands of my father.

  Though he remained undeterred from his objective, he must have considered giving up, especially that first year after my mother’s return from Schenectady. Three nights a week he dined with us, and afterward, when my mother would allow him, he would mingle his soapy hands with hers beneath the suds of the yellow dishtub she placed in the sink. His own flat was a few short blocks away and not nearly as nice as the one he rented for us. When he wasn’t visiting us, he was calling to make sure we were okay. Like me, he was afraid my mother would suffer a relapse, and he watched her carefully for the signs of the withdrawal that had signaled her previous breakdown, aware that this time, things would happen more swiftly and completely. Fearing this result, he was preternaturally patient in courting her affections, drawn to her ever more urgently as her health improved, but frightened that stepping up the pace of his courtship was as likely to result in disaster as euphoria.

  I don’t think he suspected, as I did, that my mother’s feelings for him were restricted to gratitude for his great kindness. She was fond of him, of course. Only a monster wouldn’t have been, given all he’d done. She may even have felt that it was her duty, now, to love him. That she did not was so obvious that even he should have seen it, and for all I know maybe he did. Maybe, the fact that she did not love him half as much as he deserved was balanced by the fact that he loved her twice as much as she deserved. In any case, he was there for the long haul.

  I’m glad he never asked my opinion, because I’d have had to tell him he had no chance. Night after night my mother played “Moon River” on our tinny portable record player, her eyes glazing over in the dark, until the record bupp-bupp-bupped against the center label. One thing was for sure. It wasn’t F. William Peterson she was thinking about when she g
ot like that, though I began to doubt it was anyone. My guess was that it was some imaginary person she’d met in the deep recess of her breakdown, the result of staring so long and hard out that nursing home window deep into the dark, bare woods outside her room. One afternoon when I came home from school I caught her looking at an old photograph of my father in his army uniform taken just before he went overseas, and she had the same faraway look in her eyes then. It wasn’t that she was still in love with Sam Hall, of course. The photograph probably just reminded her of the boy she’d been in love with before the war, the boy who had returned changed, who may never have existed, at least as she now imagined him.

  This is only a theory. I’ve never pretended to understand my mother.

  In the end she relented, and I’m glad, too, because I think F. William Peterson himself would have had a nervous breakdown eventually if she hadn’t let him into her bedroom. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I do remember being suddenly certain, absolutely certain, that it had happened. “Will” seemed suddenly calm and content, like a research scientist whose theories had finally been proved correct after years of collegial scoffing. The down side—and he would have many years to consider this—was that my mother, after holding him at bay for so long, apparently realized now that it had been a mistake to do so, that letting him into her bed was not such a big thing. If it made him happy, there wasn’t a reason in the world he shouldn’t be happy, or at least as happy as he could be in the knowledge that he was not, and never would be, the man of my mother’s dreams.

  The fact that F. William Peterson and my mother had become lovers was one of any number of truths my mother refused to confide in me, this despite her insistence that our relationship was built on trust and that we could tell each other anything. The result was grand comedy. When “Will” left, at around ten in the evening, I was supposed to believe that he was gone for good, never mind that the back stairs groaned under his considerable bulk when he returned a short hour later. I wasn’t supposed to know that the signal for his return was the lowering, then raising, then lowering again of her bedroom shade, though this maneuver was nearly as noisy as the stairs.

  Theirs was about the dumbest signal ever, and not just because it reduced the life expectancy of window shades (she went through three during my high school years), but because it required such extraordinary vigilance on the part of the person awaiting the signal. Poor F. William Peterson couldn’t just drive by the house every half hour. He had to be out there in the street and watching until the signal was given. If he got distracted, or nodded off, he was likely to find the light in my mother’s bedroom gone off entirely, and that was another signal. Usually, what he’d do was back out of the driveway, go around the block, and park a few houses down. From my bedroom window I could usually spot his car by the red spot where his cigarette glowed in the front seat as he waited.

  Not that this was an every-night occurrence. She let him come to her this way no more than three nights a month, and afterwards he usually creaked back down the stairs around one in the morning to sleep in his own flat. Only rarely did he stay the night, and I always figured that was because they forgot and fell asleep. Then I’d wake to whispers in the kitchen and I’d have to wait until he tramped down the back stairs in the gray half-light of dawn before I could get up and use the bathroom.

  The weirdest part of all this was that things had to be played this way solely for my mother’s benefit. I knew what was going on. F. William Peterson knew that I knew. Without trying to, we would sometimes run into each other on the stairs or in the doorway to the bathroom at a time when he wasn’t supposed to be in the house, and then I’d have to duck back into my room before she saw that I saw and thereby avoid a long, utterly bizarre explanation about how the heat had gone out in Will’s flat and so he’d slept on our sofa (which sat pristine and unrumpled, devoid of blankets and pillow or other evidence of recent occupancy, in our collective peripheral vision). I always nodded soberly at these accounts, desiring only that she stop talking, stop piling up absurdities, so that I could stop pretending abject stupidity, for stupid I would have had to be to believe a word of her nonsense. I hadn’t any great objection to her not telling me the truth, but if I couldn’t have lied any better than that I’d have told the truth and faced the devil.

  I think it was the weight of living with her, the dreadful thinness of our lies to each other, that got me thinking about going to college, and one sufficiently distant that I would not be expected to come home for holidays. I did not dislike my mother, and I certainly did not dislike F. William Peterson. It was just too nuts, like being forced to play Liars day after day with an opponent who had transparent bills. As profoundly as it had rankled me to lose to my father all the time, this slightly different version of the game I acted out with my mother was far worse. It was like playing with a kid.

  So, in my junior year in high school, I started collecting college catalogues, and finally stumbled on just what I was looking for—an anthropology major with a specialty in archaeology. The best affordable schools were all in the western United States, a perfect excuse to go far, far away. My mother put up little fuss when I made applications. Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, California. The very places she’d spoken long distance to and dreamed of. She understood me. Perfectly.

  I slept until 6:30 when the telephone woke me. I counted seventeen rings before it stopped. It was dusk outside and the Sunday street was quiet. The Ford Galaxie I’d bought to come west with over six years ago sat at the curb. I’d have to sell it in the morning, unless I could get F. William Peterson to float me a loan when my mother called back, as she surely would. He’d send the money, no questions asked, which was why I knew I wouldn’t ask him.

  There was nothing in the refrigerator but an old jar of sweet pickles I couldn’t remember buying. I ate the three or four that remained, dumped the empty jar. In the morning, after I’d sold the car, I’d see about a part-time job, one that didn’t require a car, formally withdraw from the classes I’d stopped attending anyway, rethink, start over. That left just tonight. I thought about the loan Robert Crane had offered and regretted not taking him up on it. I should have agreed to meet him and Anita at the track. I could have told him I was sorry for getting steamed at him for explaining my losing streak and let them buy me dinner to show there were no hard feelings. The pickles had made me hungry.

  It was such a pleasant scenario I hated myself for nixing the idea earlier. I consulted my watch and realized that they’d probably already left for the track. They both liked to arrive early, have a beer, pore over the program one last time. Lacking the price of admission to the clubhouse, there was no way I could drop in on them, and there was nothing to do but sit in my own dingy living room and listen to the telephone ring.

  As I sat there on the sofa feeling sorry for myself, I realized I was staring at money. My makeshift coffee table was a tree stump from the front yard, the top of which I had leveled and shaved. A girl I’d dated briefly had hammered quarters, dimes, and nickles into the soft wood surface and laminated them there, creating an illusion so real that the few visitors I had were always trying to pick them up or brush them aside so they could set their beer cans down. I don’t know how long I’d stared at them now before realizing that I wasn’t broke, not as long as I had a good claw hammer.

  An hour later I was on the road, four dollars and eighty cents in my pocket, only vaguely concerned that I had crossed an invisible line that prevented other men from mutilating tree stumps. I parked on a dark side street in South Tucson, several blocks from the fluorescent green dome of the dog track so I wouldn’t have to pay for parking. It cost extra to get into the clubhouse, but that’s where Robert and Anita would be, so I paid. I had enough left over for a beer by way of dinner.

  I drank it, leaning against the small bar where the dark men who would spring for the clubhouse, but not the extra three bucks for table seating, always congregated. I tipped the bartender my last quar
ter, which he rubbed, then sniffed, just as he had the slick coins I’d used to pay for my draft.

  The beer was cold and it immediately made me light-headed. In the last forty-eight hours I’d eaten nothing more substantial than Ben Slater’s pretzels. It was already the third race and too late to get a bet down even if I’d had the money, so I glanced through my program quickly, deciding that the first race I really wanted to bet on was the fifth, where a dog called Blue Piniella looked like he couldn’t lose. The funny part was that two of the three handicappers had him out of the money, which meant the mutt might even pay a fair price. The third handicapper, Jester, had him first, right where he should be, but Jester was acknowledged to be a flake, and this too could help.

  As the third race was being run, I watched the people at the tables along the mezzanine. The same faces every night, most of them. The old hands stayed seated and watched the race on the ceiling and wall-mounted monitors. Newcomers got up and went over to the brass railing which separated the section they were in from the one immediately below. For some reason, they wanted to see the real race under the lurid yellow lights. Only after the dogs flashed by the finish line did they return to their tables.