The Risk Pool

my hand and the magnifying glass to a large bush in the left foreground, partially obscured by the pheasant. But beneath the bush was what looked like a child’s lifeless hand, palm up. The density of the bush made it impossible to make out anything else, but the more I looked at it, the more certain I became that the hand was real, not some doll’s hand.
    It was Claude who finally folded the page carefully and put it away in a drawer.
    “How?” I heard myself ask, and even now I’m not sure what I meant by the question. How had a dead child happened into a bourbon ad? How was it that nobody had noticed the hand and prevented the picture’s publication? How had Claude himself first noticed, something virtually undetectable with the naked eye? How had he known to look with a magnifying glass?
    One afternoon when I went to visit him and his mother, I had leaned my bike against the house and started inside when I heard an urgent tapping on glass. It was coming, I discovered, from the window of the house next door, where the dark curtains had parted sufficiently to accommodate Claude’s round white face. Come around, he was motioning, to the back of the house.
    He let me in through the screened porch and the kitchen, into a dark sitting room where the old woman I’d spoken to on the afternoon of Claude’s attempted suicide was bent over a large stack of 78 rpm records that teetered against the biggest cherry Victrola I’d ever seen. Its turntable, which folded up into the rich cabinet’s innards when not in use, now lay flat on a hinged door and was spinning noisily, awaiting a record. The speakers crackled and buzzed horribly, as if the idle needle were picking up energy and sound from the atmosphere.
    Around the room stood several other equally massive pieces of furniture—a credenza, a library table, and an oak secretary—along with a sofa, love seat, and chair, each sporting an identically faded pink floral pattern. With the curtains drawn, the only light was from an old lamp with an opaque shade. Claude was beaming, as if to say,
Pretty interesting, huh
?
    “The friend!” the old woman, whose name I later remembered was Agajanian, exclaimed when she noticed me. Arising lightly, as if she were filled with feathers, she was apparently delighted to see me, as if my arrival were long awaited. The old woman’s hair, as faded as the furniture, was wild, clamped down here andthere by black bobby pins to ghastly effect, as if her hairdresser were a cruel child. The old woman was terribly thin, and her gray housedress was cinched at a waist not much larger than one of Claude’s thighs. “Please!” she cried, gesticulating wildly. “Have a seat. Do!”
    The love seat was right there, so I sat, but it was the wrong thing. “There!” she gasped. “Now you’ve sat right on top of Ralph, and he’s been cleaning those disgusting fish all day!”
    I looked over at Claude, who was beside himself with delight.
    “Baking soda!” Mrs. Agajanian said. “Tell your mother as soon as you get home. Nothing like baking soda to get out fish stink.”
    I promised I would, but she kept right on glaring at me until I slid over onto the other cushion and off the lap of the invisible Ralph. She found the record she’d been looking for and slipped it onto the turntable, which hissed even more ferociously now. I braced myself for the inevitable blast, but when the needle touched the surface of the spinning record, the terrible background noise vanished utterly. The music that replaced it was an instrumental arrangement of “September.” Mrs. Agajanian listened to a strain, then did a fluid waltz move that culminated with the old woman landing gracefully in the center of her armchair.
    “This was my husband’s personal favorite,” she said. “His name was Byron and he was a terrible queer, though he never told me until just before he died. Out of consideration for my feelings, he said. Anybody can believe that that wants to.”
    The old woman glared at me to see if I wanted to.
    “I’m a Christian woman, of course, and not the sort to abide faggotry of any description. He kept his secret until he was ready to die and there wasn’t anything I could do to him. He was clever about things.”
    She had a glass of something on the end table beside her and she took a sip from it.
    “God’s got him now, so it doesn’t matter.”
    When “September” finished she put on another record. “Saber Dance,” she said.