The Risk Pool

smaller one that was walled with bookcases that rose right to the ceiling. Most of them were full of books, though some held expensive-looking knickknacks like the ones I’d stolen to spruce up our old house. I even recognized a piece or two, and I thought it strange that anybody would actually buy pewter goblets and cut glass owls and green bottles wrapped in leather.
    There was a television in the corner of the room and Jack Ward turned it on, ripping through channels impatiently. When he didn’t find a ball game, he turned it off again, though I’d have been happy to watch just about anything on a TV with no snow.
    “You like to read?” he said.
    I said I did. Very much.
    He looked around the room with distaste. “Well,” he said, letting the thought trail off. It was my father’s word, but with Jack Ward, you could guess what direction his thought was headed. “Somebody’ll be in in a minute,” he said, without much confidence. And then he too was gone.
    Maybe Jack Ward didn’t care for it, but I was never more impressed with a room than I was with that one. I wasn’t even sorry to be left alone in it for a while. It was tight and quiet and good smelling, a contrast to the big, drafty, echoing rooms I lived in with my father. Here each sound had only a moment’s life before it disappeared into the carpet or the tall shelves full of heavy books. There was a stone fireplace along one wall, its polished wooden mantel lined with photographs. The majority of them were pictures of a young Mrs. Ward with a very slender older man who reminded me a little of the photographs of mygrandfather my mother was always showing me when I was a little boy. I have examined these since, and the two men could not have looked more dissimilar, except for their exaggerated slenderness and a rather peculiarly erect carriage. But there was an uncanny resemblance between the young Mrs. Ward of the photographs and her daughter Tria, and I examined each photo for clues to the mother’s transformation from young woman to mummy. There appeared to be no transition, however. In girlhood Mrs. Ward had been light, small, lovely, like Tria, though more pale; then suddenly she was a woman standing there beside the same man, who had appeared not to have aged at all, though his daughter had shrunken in upon herself. There were also pictures of Tria as a little girl, with those same anxious eyes, perched uncomfortably on her grandfather’s lap. Jack Ward himself wasn’t pictured anywhere.
    Next to the stone fireplace was a bookcase unlike the others in that one whole shelf was empty except for a thick, leather-bound volume on a stand, opened to the middle, like the big dictionary in the Mohawk Free Library. At the top of each manuscript page was typed, in gray fading letters, “The History of Mohawk County,” just to the right of the author’s name—William Henry Smythe. Since there was nobody to tell me I shouldn’t, I leafed through the brittle pages, discovering that there were nearly seven hundred, all in the same fading gray type. The manuscript was flanked by two red candles in squat gold holders, and the whole arrangement reminded me of the Monsignor’s altar at Our Lady of Sorrows.
    As I took all of this in, I became vaguely aware of voices in a remote part of the house. I had been alone in the room for quite some time, and when I opened the door and poked my head out into the dining room to see if anyone was around, the voices were louder. I recognized them as belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Ward, and they were coming from the bedroom farthest down the long corridor. Nearer me, halfway down the hall, the door Tria had disappeared behind was partially ajar, and it moved almost imperceptibly as I watched. When the voices stopped, it closed.
    It took me a while to make it back down the road through the pitch-black trees, arms out in front of me like a blind man, with just the sound of the highway below and the feel of the blacktopto go by. I emerged from the trees just as a car pulled up and let my father out by the convertible. “What a crazy son of a bitch,” he said when I got in. He was referring to Drew Littler, of course, but for a moment I thought maybe he meant me for still being right where he’d left me.

22
    Among my entrepreneurial activities that summer, I salvaged golf balls from the narrow pond that served as a hazard on the thirteenth and fourteenth holes of the Mohawk Country Club. To judge from its location,