The Risk Pool

“That’s the way it always is when people truly care about each other.” Her eyes would go dreamy and distant then, as if she weren’t talking to me, but some imaginary person. “No amount of time, no amount of distance … nothing matters when two people …”
    I always felt horrible when she said such things, though I knew that thinking them made her feel good and helped her get to sleep. Trouble was, after listening,
I
couldn’t get to sleep, because what she insisted on was so
un
true it was frightening. The more she harped on what good friends we were, and how we knew each other’s thoughts so completely that speaking was unnecessary, the longer I stayed awake wondering what was wrong with her, what kind of blindness it was that kept her from seeing that the two years I’d lived with my father had changed everything. I wasn’t even
a
boy anymore, much less
her
boy. Every time she smiled and said we must take care never to lose that special thing we had, that rare ability to be completely honest with each other, it made me want to cry, because of course our rapport—that wasone of her favorite words, rapport—was purely a figment of her imagination. I hadn’t the slightest intention of telling her anything but the most soothing lies I could invent.
    Most of the time we had nothing to say to each other at all. The long nights I’d spent alone in my father’s apartment had made me introspective, the world’s worst company, and there must have been times when she wondered what had become of the kid whose mouth had run nonstop from the moment she walked in the door from the telephone company, in need of a little peace. It probably would have charmed and eased her mind to hear me chatter again, and I think I would have if I could have thought of something to say.
    What seemed inevitable to me was that one day, probably one day soon, she would suffer another collapse and return to the hospital. By being a model son and avoiding truth and other natural upsets, I hoped only to delay that return as long as possible. In the beginning, I hoped for a year. When at the end of that period she was not only still intact but had actually gained some ground, I was glad but unconvinced, even though by then she had reduced her daily ration of libriums from four or five to three or four. She had also put on more weight and begun to look womanly again. Her hair, which had been cut short when she was in the home, grew out again, and she spent a long time each night, just before bed, brushing it out before the mirror in her bedroom. Sometimes, when the light was right, and she tilted her head a certain way, she looked more like a girl of nineteen than a woman sneaking up on forty.
    For her rejuvenation F. William Peterson deserved all the credit. Something about my mother had touched him long ago, maybe even that first afternoon she had come to see him, to get him to help with her divorce. At some juncture he must have realized that she was trouble, but he stuck with her. I don’t know how much of his own money and professional time he spent in the hospital and later in Schenectady. I’ve asked him about it more than once, but never gotten a straight answer, and I know now that I probably never will. That he visited her regularly I know. That he spent his own money I deeply suspect. By no means the worst lawyer in Mohawk, he seemed to profit as little as any of them. I know he paid dearly and dutifully to the wronged Mrs. Peterson until that good woman finally relented and married real money in the shape of a plumber from Amsterdam, but I thinkwhen the money from the sale of my mother’s little house began to evaporate he helped with the arrangements. As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, the night that my father caught him with a woman at The Elms must have been an anomaly in his behavior, symptomatic of the decline of his marriage, because from the moment my mother became the woman in his life, I’ve never known him to show the slightest interest in any other.
    In fact, F. William Peterson’s devotion to my mother bordered on the pitiful, especially given the trouble she’d caused him. Thanks to her he had been administered a thorough beating by my father, who seldom, over the years, missed an opportunity to promise another thrashing should the opportunity arise or the lawyer’s behavior warrant. I once counted nine separate public humiliations that Will, as my mother referred to him, suffered at the