The Risk Pool

asking if I could go along to the viewing. That morning I’d awakened feeling better about things and I spit-shined my cordovan shoes and even ironed one of my white dress-up shirts. We always had our dirty clothes washed and folded at the laundry around the corner, but we did our own ironing when being wrinkled wasn’t acceptable. For me that was practically never. Today was different, though. After I bathed, I tried half a dozen new styles while my hair was soaking wet and would go where the comb said. Once dry of course it would do what it wanted, but it was fun to imagine having hair like James Dean or Elvis. They wouldn’t have worn a white shirt with gold cufflinks and matching tie clasp, but I had to admit I didn’t looktoo bad all spiffed up, my big ears not withstanding. The only problem was my blue blazer, which I hadn’t worn in many months and which turned out to be too tight. When she’d purchased it a little over two years ago, my mother was insistent that there be “room to grow,” and she wasn’t content until she found one that hung limp, its sleeves down over the second knuckle. Now, no matter how I tugged at them, those same sleeves were up over my wrist and my shoulders strained the seam down the back. Still, I concluded, as I sat impatiently in the backseat of the convertible, my fingernails were clean and I looked good enough to court a girl at her father’s wake.
    “Anyway,” Eileen said to my father, “you finally got around to wearing the cologne I got you for Christmas.” He was inching toward the center of the narrow road, apparently contemplating passing the long line of cars that snaked around a blind curve in the woods.
    “What?” he said, after thinking better of it and drifting back. Then they both turned around and looked at me.
    I shrugged.
    “At least it’s not going to waste,” she sighed.
    “Stay downwind of the casket,” my father said. “You don’t want to start Jack sneezing.”
    By the time we got within sight of the Ward house, night had fallen. Cars lined the long circular drive on both sides and were parked all over the lawn both inside and outside the stone pillars, which were themselves nearly a hundred yards from the house. In fact, cars were parked all the way down to the edge of the trees where Drew and I had parked the motorcycle and watched the house until Jack Ward came out on the patio to watch us.
    I was reminded again of Drew’s strange vow to one day own the white jewel house, and it gave me a chill to realize that even so small an obstacle to his doing so had now been removed. After all, if Jack Ward, who had everything, could lose it all, including his life, on the back nine of the Mohawk Country Club, then wasn’t it possible that the wheel of fortune could spin in the other direction? What if when we got inside we discovered Drew Littler all dressed up and standing next to Tria Ward in the receiving line, holding her hand by way of comfort? For a dreadful instant it seemed plausible. The Ward house was one of the few places my father hadn’t looked for him.
    The more I thought about it, I had to smile, even though myown chances of ingratiating myself into the affections of Tria Ward and her mother were not appreciably better. I was a little smarter than Drew Littler, maybe, and a little less of a social liability, a lot less belligerent and aggressive. I could say I knew who my father was, the advantage of which was not clear-cut, it seemed to me. If pure luck—indeed some rather extravagant manifestation of it—did not intervene, Drew Littler and I would probably share a common, very common, destiny. But I feared fortune just the same, even if it was more likely to intervene on my humble behalf than Drew Littler’s.
    “I wouldn’t park here,” Eileen said when my father turned off the lights and the ignition. We were half on the shoulder, half on the pavement.
    “That’s interesting,” my father said, getting out.
    One of the reasons Eileen wouldn’t have parked there was that the car was right up against a bush, which made it impossible to get out the passenger side.
    “Come on, Slick,” my father said to me, letting his own door swing shut.
    Once I was out, there was nothing for Eileen to do but slide across the seat and get out on my father’s side. “The trouble with my life,” she said, “is that it’s too goddamn full of gallantry.”
    There was a bottleneck of about fifty people at the front door, patiently