The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  The Monsignor stopped spooning broth. “I assure you I did not know. It would have been good of you to bring it to my attention. You bring other unpleasant matters to my attention.”

  Father Michaels folded his napkin carefully. “Your wedding soup was splendid, Mrs. A,” he said. And then he did a thoroughly unexpected thing. With the Monsignor still seated and soaking up the last of his puddle with black bread, and before grace could conclude the meal, the young priest got up and left the room.

  6

  I had mixed feelings about the possibility that my father had returned to Mohawk. I doubted he was quite as dangerous as my mother said. Or maybe I just concluded he wouldn’t be dangerous to me. As with the mower, it was largely a matter of positioning. Still, life had become comfortable and happy without him. My mother was clearly happier than ever before, and she seldom even complained about the phone company. I enjoyed my long days at the rectory. They started with the early morning mass, and most of the time my mother accompanied me. We liked the walk together past the bakery, which at that hour was awash in lovely aromas. In church, my mother sat closer to the altar now, but still off to one side, between the first and second stations of the cross. She still did not receive communion, and most mornings she was the only person in Our Lady of Sorrows who did not.

  After mass, Father Michaels and I would sometimes give her a lift home in the parish station wagon before returning to the rectory for breakfast, and then the day would stretch out before me. Part of it I would spend on Spindrift Island, part helping Skinny tend the grounds. Once the storm of indignation over the stained glass window blew over, I even started mowing again, this time with the Monsignor’s blessing, which was secured indirectly through Father Michaels. He called it interceding, like what the Virgin did with her Son, and he interceded for Skinny too, so he could come out of hiding and do some work at least.

  In short, life seemed pretty much the way it should be, and while I sometimes felt a strange yearning to see my father again, I didn’t want him turning up and upsetting things. I kept imagining that late some afternoon, when my mother and Father Michaels and I were all sitting on the front porch before she went in to fix dinner, my father would careen around the corner in the same old bullet-riddled white convertible and come to a rocking halt, one wheel over the curb, his blackened thumb tapping time on the steering wheel. For some reason I feared this scenario even more than a second kidnapping or the resumption of his nightly marauding when my mother and I would be alone. Not that Father Michaels wasn’t prepared for the sort of man my father was. I just didn’t want them to meet. The young priest might have had the courage to stand up to the old Monsignor, but I doubted he’d be a match for my father.

  One morning after breakfast I found Skinny in the shed sharpening the long-handled cutting spade he used to trim the terrace along the street. The Monsignor did not believe in allowing grass to grow over the edge of the sidewalk, so every third week or so we dug a small two-inch trench along the border of the walk. Skinny enjoyed the job about as much as he enjoyed mowing. Early morning often found him in a bad mood anyway, and he was sometimes sharp with me then. I knew he felt insulted that I should be invited to the feast each morning when he himself wasn’t allowed in the back door for a drink of water. He didn’t blame me exactly, but the whole thing didn’t sit well. Today, he seemed in a better mood than usual. “Your old man says hi,” he said.

  I stopped still and didn’t say anything. I’d been wanting to pin him down on the business of having seen my father, but I was a little afraid and a little ashamed to admit how little I knew about his whereabouts.

  “Said to tell you he’d be around to see you one of these days.”

  I didn’t tell my mother. It would just get her started on Skinny again. She wasn’t a great person to bring bad news to. Father Michaels may have guessed that something was wrong on the way home, but he didn’t try to make me talk and did not join us on the porch as usual. He got out of the station wagon and stood there in the street until my mother appeared at the screen door to let me in.

  That night our dinner was so silent I began to suspect she already knew. Probably someone had seen him and called her, she was so thoughtful and nervous. After dinner she did the dishes hurriedly, checking the clock every few minutes, and when I didn’t get to listen to my usual Friday night radio shows I was almost grateful. “Go to sleep,” my mother instructed me when I was tucked in, but it wasn’t completely dark yet and she seemed so agitated I didn’t think I’d be able to. Alone in bed, I tried to gear myself up for the future. Sam Hall was back in town, and that meant things would change. There was no telling how. Maybe I would be swiped again. Maybe they would just yell at each other. Maybe my mother would shoot him and go to jail. She didn’t have a gun anymore, as far as I knew, but then I hadn’t known about the first one. I lay awake for a long time thinking about the possibilities and how they would change things.

  I wasn’t aware of having fallen asleep, but when I awoke from the vivid dream, my room was dark and it felt late. In the dream the old Monsignor, my mother and I were all seated around the long table in the rectory waiting for Mrs. Ambrosino and her steaming tureen of wedding soup. My father was there too, where Father Michaels usually sat. He had a fishhook in his black thumb.

  “Honestly, Sam,” my mother said when she saw the monofilament line dangling there. The Monsignor was to marry them all over again, as soon as we finished lunch. But now she had spotted the line, and I could tell by the look on her face that she didn’t want to marry anybody with a fishhook stuck in his black thumb. For my father’s part, he didn’t seem to care. “Kiss my ass, Jenny,” he said, and yanked out the hook so that blood spurted out onto the white table cloth. “The finest veal meatballs,” Mrs. Ambrosino said, apropos of nothing. The Monsignor ladled broth as he spoke. “I would appreciate a word with both of you on the subject of this boy …”

  From my open bedroom window I could see out across the dark backyards where the cops had chased my father that winter so long ago. The night was quiet and sleepy, but I was wide awake now. A dog down the block barked sharply twice and shook his chain. I got up and looked out the window, but it was too dark to see much. In the quarter moonlight only dark outlines—of garages, fences, trees, and houses—were visible against the night. The maple I had been climbing the last time my father was in Mohawk had grown too; fully mature, its highest branches now far above the peak of our house. He had stood there, silently, on the porch below and watched me. I had been too afraid to jump even so short a distance, and it had seemed to me that no one understood me so completely as my father must have at that moment. And when I heard a soft footfall on the porch below, followed by the creaking hinge on the screen door, I knew he had come for me. Again the dog shook his chain, but this time he did not bark.

  Positioning myself at the bedroom door, I listened. My mother always kept the downstairs doors locked, not that that would keep my father out. Down the hall I saw a thin crease of light below her door, enough to make the top of the stair gray instead of black. A stair creaked before I could decide whether or not to warn her.

  It was all happening too fast, as if he had somehow walked right through the locked door below, as if inserting, turning, withdrawing a key were mere formalities to be dispensed with since no one was present to witness them. The footfalls on the stair were not anxious, though. They came, softly and heavily, stopping on the landing, as if to listen for my breathing. I counted the stairs and before he reached the top, scrambled back into bed. Sleep, I thought. If I could just get to sleep, it would not be happening. If he thought I was asleep, maybe he would not take me. I waited.

  Surprisingly, there were no more footfalls, and the dog outside was quiet. I thought I heard low voices, and listened intently until I heard them again. Had they come from the street outside? I waited for the dog to bark again.

  When he didn’t, I crept to the door and opened it a crack. The pale ribbon of light was still v
isible beneath my mother’s bedroom door, and I heard her voice, soft and low, before the light went out.

  Then I went back to bed, my heart pounding. He had not come to steal me. My father had simply come home.

  I woke up early, still excited, to the sound of voices in the kitchen below. The sun was shining brilliantly and I stopped dressing long enough to locate my friend the dog, who was vigorously shaking his chain, three backyards away. Good dog, I thought.

  I took the stairs three to a stride, pulling my t-shirt over my head at the same time. I stopped at the landing. My mother was at the table, sitting in my chair, her back to the stairs. She turned when she heard me coming and smiled. Father Michaels was at the table too. He was not wearing his collar.

  “Look who’s come for breakfast,” my mother said.

  My friend, who had been studying his hands, smiled at me weakly.

  “So what’s the matter?” she said. “Are you going to just stand there?”

  When I did precisely that, she broke into song:

  ’Cause when you’re up, you’re up.

  And when you’re down you’re down.

  And when you’re only halfway up,

  You’re neither up nor down.

  “Can I go outside and play ball?” I said.

  “Okay,” she agreed. It was an unheard-of privilege before breakfast, but she was in about the best mood ever. “Don’t wander off though. I’m going to fix us all a stunning breakfast.”

  Outside, I checked the street for any car that might conceivably belong to my father, but there wasn’t a convertible in sight. And nothing with bullet holes. Inside, they were talking, but their voices were low. I heard my mother say, “Don’t worry.” Then she resumed humming, “When you’re up, you’re up.”

  I fielded hard, angry grounders, and when I was called for breakfast, I said I wasn’t hungry.

  “Be that way, sourpuss,” my mother said, and went back inside. Then Father Michaels said something, and she told him again not to worry. Horrid Patrick Donovan just had me all worked up over my father.

  “I’ll go talk to him,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “You’ll talk to me.”

  It was nearly lunch time when I heard him leave. My mother came out onto the back porch and called, but I was out of sight around back of the small storage shed and I didn’t answer. I heard her say, “I don’t know where he’s disappeared to.”

  Our house was next to the corner, and when the priest turned up the block toward Our Lady of Sorrows, he got a good view of the backyards all down the block. He spied me sitting up against the back wall of the shed and stopped. There was a fence between us, so he couldn’t come over. We looked at each other for a minute, and he raised his hand in a half wave. I made him wait before raising mine. And I only gave in because he looked like the saddest man in the world.

  My mother and I went to the nine o’clock mass on Sunday, and I hoped, for the first time ever, that it would be the Monsignor’s service. We got there early and the church was practically empty, like a weekday mass, except that the sun was high and the light from the stained glass windows illuminated the whole church without the aid of the overheads. My mother looked a little like one of the stained glass windows, radiant and colorful in a summery dress. She wouldn’t have been able to hide in the shadows even if there had been any. Her mood was irrepressibly good, just like Saturday’s. I had tried to damage that mood both days, and I knew it couldn’t be done. “When will Dad come see us?” I had asked her.

  “Hard to say,” she admitted. “We’ve been lucky so far.”

  But having said that, she relented a little and took my hand. “I know you can’t forget him,” she said. “He is your father. But you shouldn’t take everything to heart so. I know you want to think he loves you, and maybe he will someday. When someone loves you,” she went on, “you don’t have to wish for it to be so. You just know it is.”

  “Well, I know,” I told her.

  “No, you wish. You have to be careful of wishing. It can hurt. It’s better to wait until you know. Waiting for your father to turn up won’t make him do it.”

  I didn’t care for that answer, so I withdrew my hand.

  “You needn’t take it out on me, in any case,” she said. “If you wanted me, it would help. I’d know, and you wouldn’t have to tell me. That’s the way it is between people who love each other.”

  Then her eyes got a faraway look and it was like talking to somebody who wasn’t there.

  I figured I’d be the first one in the sacristy, but Father Michaels was already there, and if that wasn’t strange enough, he was already fully vested and praying at the kneeler beneath the window, which nobody ever used except to stack things on. He didn’t appear to notice when I came in, which was fine with me. I got my cassock and surplice on, lit the low mass candles, carried the red Bible to the pulpit, turned on the correct overheads. All this took ten minutes or so, and when I got back to the sacristy, he was still at the kneeler staring off into space. I wondered if the minds of priests wandered when they were praying the way mine did. Sometimes, if I was just an extra on the altar, without any specific duties to stay alert for, I’d drift away and miss just about the whole thing.

  He noticed me this time and got up quickly. “Ned,” he said with satisfaction, and he smiled at me so warmly I decided not to be mad at him anymore. He couldn’t help not being my father and he hadn’t meant to disappoint me by being at the breakfast table when I had in mind a different sort of man entirely. Right then, when he smiled at me, I decided it would be better if I had dreamed the dog barking and the footsteps on the stair and the light beneath my mother’s door. All day Saturday I had thought about whether or not I had dreamed it, and now I decided I had. He offered a hand, and I took it.

  “Are we ready?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said, “but we’ve still got ten minutes.”

  “You’re right,” he said, glancing at the clock. “I suppose we have to wait.”

  With five minutes to go, the sacristy door blew open and three other altar boys came in, laughing and shoving each other, then making a point of desisting.

  “Ned will serve,” Father Michaels said, much to everyone’s surprise, when we were all assembled. Of the four, I had the least seniority, and normally I would have been assigned to guarding the sacristy door. Though considered competent to serve at weekday mass, boys of my age and limited credentials were thought unequal to the same task on Sunday before a packed house, which had been known to give even the steadiest hand the shakes at bell-ringing time. I flushed at the breach of decorum, and the looks on the faces of the older boys spoke plainly that no such travesty would have been tolerated by the Monsignor.

  But no one dared protest, and when we lined up Father Michaels put me before him and rested his slender hand on my shoulder. Then, solemnly, we approached the altar of God, the Holy Tabernacle, to celebrate the great mystery of faith.

  The first hint that something was wrong came after the gospel, when Father Michaels closed the book, retreated from the pulpit to the altar and began the offertory. I could not remember another instance of a Sunday mass without a sermon, and I could tell that the other boys were equally astonished and grateful. I tried to think what the reason might be, but there just wasn’t any. Father Michaels usually did not talk as long as the Monsignor, and his sermons were generally less interesting than his casual conversation, but he always said something. Now, as he read from the ordinary of the mass, it seemed to me that his voice had become terribly thin.

  When I took him the cruets, he was pale and perspiring, and it occurred to me he had not been sweating so profusely of late, which was odd, since the early August heat was the worst of the summer. I wanted to ask if he was all right, but as he poured the wine into the chalice, his Latin, though halting, was unbroken. And besides, during this portion of the proceedings all conversation was, by convention, taboo. When he placed the cruets back on the tray, there was nothin
g to do but return to my station at the foot of the altar. On my way, I glanced out into the congregation where my mother’s bright dress stood out, and she smiled at me, apparently aware that my serving a Sunday mass was an honor. On my padded kneeler, I touched the cool handle of the gold-plated bell, though it wasn’t yet time.

  I removed the gold communion paten from its cloth sheath when the four long lines of communicants approached the railing. We began as always on St. Joseph’s side and inched our way toward the statue of the Virgin, which presided over the other side altar. Those kneeling waited a few moments after receiving the host, then made the sign of the cross and stood, their places immediately filled by other communicants. I was proud of the job I was doing, smoothly inserting the communion plate beneath each expectant chin without chopping any throats. There was a rhythm that took over after a while, and it became easier to follow my friend’s hand from chalice to tongue.

  I was so intent on my job that I almost did not notice when one of the vacated places along the rail was taken by my mother. Seeing her kneeling there made me wonder if all the strange things in the world were going to happen in this one mass. During the years that we had been attending mass, she had never received Communion, and when I asked her why, all she had said was that she would when she felt like she was in the state of grace. Catechism class had taught me the answer to that one, but when I suggested she just go to Confession and wipe the slate clean, she only smiled. But now there she was, and if ever a woman looked like she was in the state of grace, my mother did then. She looked as radiant as the virgin who stood above her, as different as could be from the woman who had shot out the windshield and front tire of my father’s convertible and then eaten Librium for two months to calm down. She had become softer, lovelier, almost younger, in her bright, sleeveless summer dress. Everyone in the church seemed to be looking at her.