The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  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.

  “Ned?” my mother’s voice floated in, high and false from the kitchen. “Would you ask our guest if he’d like something cool to drink?”

  I looked over at Father Michaels, who shook his head at me, as if speech were an impossibility.

  “Nope,” I yelled.

  “Perhaps he would like to open the bottle of wine?”

  He nodded this time. He was still holding the bottle and had read the front and back labels several times, rotating the bottle again and again, making me wish I had something to read too. My mother left the salad she was tossing in order to hand me the corkscrew along with a scalding look. Working on
the bottle, Father Michaels appeared to regain his composure. He thanked me for handing him the corkscrew and I felt like thanking him for thanking me. “Ever see one of these in action?” he said.

  I hadn’t. The corkscrew’s presence in the utensil drawer had always perplexed me since it was the only item in there that was never used. Father Michaels used the pointed tip to cut the outer wrapping and expose the cork, which he then extracted so deftly I was surprised. His movements on the altar and even in the sacristy always seemed clumsy, as if he were remembering what he was supposed to do at the last second. No matter how many times he wore certain vestments, he could never seem to remember where the clasps were and would circle himself trying to locate them like a dog chasing his tail. I’d never seen anybody remove a cork from a wine bottle before, but I doubted anybody could do it more gracefully.

  He was examining the cork when my mother came in and said “Gentlemen?” She seemed to have regained her composure too.

  When Father Michaels presented her with the bottle, he said, “I hope it doesn’t clash with what you’ve prepared,” and my mother laughed like that was about the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

  All things considered, I thought dinner went quite well. Our small kitchen was overheated from the oven, but with the back and front doors open we got a breeze. My mother apologized for the casserole, but the priest wouldn’t hear of it, and pretended to read from the back of the wine bottle that it was a perfect complement to red meats, pasta dishes, and hot dog casseroles. He praised my mother’s oil and vinegar dressing, claiming that most people showed neither judgment nor restraint when it came to vinegar. I was given a small glass of wine. To everyone’s surprise, Father Michaels turned out to be a wonderful conversationalist and when he found his stride there was no need for anybody to talk who didn’t want to. He also stopped perspiring. He told us how he had worked as a waiter and busboy in a big New York hotel on vacations before entering the seminary. He had many interesting stories to tell, and listening to him you had to remind yourself that he was a priest. My mother must have had the same reaction, because after a couple glasses of wine she relaxed and even smiled over at me with something like her usual fondness. Before long, the casserole dish had been scraped clean and two lonely Bermuda onion rings swam in the bottom of the salad bowl. And then, as if the evening hadn’t been strange enough already, Father Michaels suggested I go outside and play ball against the side of the house while he talked with my excellent mother about some little matter of business. I hadn’t said two words during dinner, but I was still surprised to discover my friend considered my presence dispensible to the social equilibrium. My mother looked surprised too.

  But I grabbed my mitt and rubber ball and went outside. The foundation of our house was stone and perfect for throwing grounders. There was only one more week of fifth grade, then a whole summer of I did not know what. I doubted you could just catch grounders for three whole months. If my father had been around, we could have gotten Wussy and gone fishing, and that would have accounted for one day. As it was, I wondered what would become of me.

  From where I threw the ball against the side of the house I could see diagonally in the kitchen window, but the late afternoon light reflected off it, and only the outline of Father Michaels’s back was visible. Occasionally, though, I heard my mother laugh.

  5

  And so the rectory became my second home, much to the satisfaction of everyone except the old Monsignor, who took no pleasure in having even such a quiet boy on the church grounds. My presence continued to surprise him when we encountered one another on the lawn between the rectory and the church, and I could tell that he would have liked to run me off the way he did the other boys who occasionally climbed the chain-link fence on a short cut to the ball field. I never caused him any trouble that I know of, but he always looked at me suspiciously, and if I happened to be carrying my rubber ball, he reminded me that stained glass windows were not cheaply replaced. It was clear that he did not think much of me, which was understandable enough, given the number of my confessions he’d heard. One of the things I liked best about Father Michaels was that after hearing people’s confessions he didn’t seem to think the worse of them. He heard mine a couple of times and didn’t treat me any differently afterwards. I preferred confessing to the old Monsignor though. My new friend was too nice a man to lie to.

  On weekday mornings, after mass, we usually had breakfast in the high-ceilinged rectory dining room. I’d never seen so much food at a morning meal. At home, my mother had neither the time nor the inclination to cook breakfast before going to work, so usually all I got was a sugar donut or buttered graham cracker. At the rectory, Mrs. Ambrosino, a widow of advancing middle age, who had cooked for the Monsignor since the death of her husband, brought on huge platters of food that filled the long rectory table. Except on Fridays, there were bacon and sausage, and sometimes ham, along with towers of toast, half a dozen eggs fried in butter, pitchers of juice and milk and bowls of fruit. You could have pancakes if you asked for them. There was so much food and so much of it went unconsumed that for a long time I was under the impression that company was anticipated which kept failing to show up. The old Monsignor, even before his health began to fail, had never been a prodigious eater, and most mornings he could be induced to eat little more than half a grapefruit, which contributed, in my opinion, to his sour disposition. That left the rest of the feast to Father Michaels and me. My friend ate like he did everything else, nervously, and I often felt that he would have eaten more and enjoyed it better if he’d felt entitled to it. But eating with genuine good appetite is no easy thing when you are seated at the opposite end of a long table from a man who makes it a point of moral significance to subsist on half a grapefruit, eaten in under a minute so that the bowl could be pushed emphatically away, another duty done. It’s not nearly so hard when you’re a boy seated halfway down the table, directly in front of the bacon and sausage and influenced more by aroma than moral statements. I ate like a dog.

  “Ned,” my friend would say, using his cloth napkin to mop his forehead before placing it in the middle of his plate, “you’re a wonder.”

  Mrs. Ambrosino apparently thought so too, though she derived no satisfaction from the fact that somebody was eating the food she prepared. As far as she was concerned, nobody counted but the old pastor. Father Michaels she ignored as if he did not exist, despite his repeated compliments on her cooking. She was not cooking for the handsome young interloper any more than for the urchin he had, for reasons known only to himself, allowed to invade the sanctity of the rectory. Everything she did was for the father, the old Monsignor, who had officiated at every important religious ceremony in her lifetime, the last being her husband’s funeral. She had not always been a religious woman, though she was one now. As a young woman she had lived with the man she eventually married while they waited for his wife to oblige them by dying, which she eventually did. Mrs. Ambrosino had been wild then, as wild as any girl in Mohawk, uncontrollable in her passion for that awful woman’s husband, but when she finally got him the passion leaked away, and now her only passion was for the old priest’s health, which she equated with eating. “Mangia,” she implored him, hemming him in with platters of food, many of them rich delicacies searched out and ordered all the way from New York City to tempt him back to health. “Keep up your spirit.”

  “Good Mrs. Ambrosino,” the old man responded. “It is not a question of spirit but of cholesterol. Your husband died of lasagne. An avoidable fate.”

  As a matter of principle, however, the old priest had no objection to the overabundance of food, though he himself had no intention of eating it. A pastor for nearly forty years at Our Lady of Sorrows, he liked to keep up appearances. The rectory and church were freshly painted on alternate years, and a large part of the collection money went to upkeep. A full-time grounds-keeper was employed to tend carefully planted, cross-shaped flower beds on the main lawn, and the hedges and weeping w
illows were kept manicured. In the autumn, leaves were raked every day, and when people came to mass on Sundays in October they often remarked that leaves knew better than to fall where they were not allowed. The Monsignor considered himself both a good priest and a successful one, and he enjoyed the idea of a well-stocked table, in contrast to which his meager grapefruit might be fully appreciated.

  After breakfast the old priest usually retired and Father Michaels often had visits to make in the community. As often as not, I was left to my own devices. The grounds within the chain-link boundaries of Our Lady of Sorrows were extensive and lovely. There were several trees that I yearned to climb, but I knew that such deviant behavior would have been frowned on by the Monsignor, whose tolerance of my mere presence seemed precarious enough. A stand of tall pines along the back fence behind the church provided cool, dark shade, and most days I sat beneath them on a blanket of pine needles reading about the wonderfully improbable adventures of two teenage boys on an island populated exclusively by the world’s foremost scientists, who were given to inventing things like ray guns that first got the boys into and then out of trouble. Sometimes when he returned from his duties Father Michaels would join me and we would listen to the breeze high up in the pines and I would tell him what was new on Spindrift Island. “Ned,” he would say, “you’re a wonder. Who else would think to go around back of a church?”