The Risk Pool

hands of my father.
    Though he remained undeterred from his objective, he must have considered giving up, especially that first year after my mother’s return from Schenectady. Three nights a week he dined with us, and afterward, when my mother would allow him, he would mingle his soapy hands with hers beneath the suds of the yellow dishtub she placed in the sink. His own flat was a few short blocks away and not nearly as nice as the one he rented for us. When he wasn’t visiting us, he was calling to make sure we were okay. Like me, he was afraid my mother would suffer a relapse, and he watched her carefully for the signs of the withdrawal that had signaled her previous breakdown, aware that this time, things would happen more swiftly and completely. Fearing this result, he was preternaturally patient in courting her affections, drawn to her ever more urgently as her health improved, but frightened that stepping up the pace of his courtship was as likely to result in disaster as euphoria.
    I don’t think he suspected, as I did, that my mother’s feelings for him were restricted to gratitude for his great kindness. She was fond of him, of course. Only a monster wouldn’t have been, given all he’d done. She may even have felt that it was her duty, now, to love him. That she did not was so obvious that even he should have seen it, and for all I know maybe he did. Maybe, the fact that she did not love him half as much as he deserved was balanced by the fact that he loved her twice as much as she deserved. In any case, he was there for the long haul.
    I’m glad he never asked my opinion, because I’d have had totell him he had no chance. Night after night my mother played “Moon River” on our tinny portable record player, her eyes glazing over in the dark, until the record bupp-bupp-bupped against the center label. One thing was for sure. It wasn’t F. William Peterson she was thinking about when she got like that, though I began to doubt it was anyone. My guess was that it was some imaginary person she’d met in the deep recess of her breakdown, the result of staring so long and hard out that nursing home window deep into the dark, bare woods outside her room. One afternoon when I came home from school I caught her looking at an old photograph of my father in his army uniform taken just before he went overseas, and she had the same faraway look in her eyes then. It wasn’t that she was still in love with Sam Hall, of course. The photograph probably just reminded her of the boy she’d been in love with before the war, the boy who had returned changed, who may never have existed, at least as she now imagined him.
    This is only a theory. I’ve never pretended to understand my mother.
    In the end she relented, and I’m glad, too, because I think F. William Peterson himself would have had a nervous breakdown eventually if she hadn’t let him into her bedroom. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I do remember being suddenly certain, absolutely certain, that it had happened. “Will” seemed suddenly calm and content, like a research scientist whose theories had finally been proved correct after years of collegial scoffing. The down side—and he would have many years to consider this—was that my mother, after holding him at bay for so long, apparently realized now that it had been a mistake to do so, that letting him into her bed was not such a big thing. If it made him happy, there wasn’t a reason in the world he shouldn’t
be
happy, or at least as happy as he could be in the knowledge that he was not, and never would be, the man of my mother’s dreams.
    The fact that F. William Peterson and my mother had become lovers was one of any number of truths my mother refused to confide in me, this despite her insistence that our relationship was built on trust and that we could tell each other anything. The result was grand comedy. When “Will” left, at around ten in the evening, I was supposed to believe that he was gone for good, never mind that the back stairs groaned under his considerable bulk when he returned a short hour later. I wasn’t supposed toknow that the signal for his return was the lowering, then raising, then lowering again of her bedroom shade, though this maneuver was nearly as noisy as the stairs.
    Theirs was about the dumbest signal ever, and not just because it reduced the life expectancy of window shades (she went through three during my high school years), but because