The Risk Pool

have just discovered!”
    Tria—she was still quite beautiful, long dark hair halfway down her back—leaned forward over the steering wheel to look, first at me, then to see if there was someone else.
    “You don’t recognize your old compatriot, Mr.…”
    “Hall,” I supplied.
    “Mr. Hall,” Mrs. Ward verified.
    “Oh … yes,” Tria said and smiled almost charmingly enough to mask the fact that she had not the slightest recollection of me.
    “I’ve invited Mr. Hall to brunch with us in the morning,” she said, getting into the small front seat with some difficulty. “Mr. Hall is an historian.”
    “Actually—” I began.
    “And a graduate of the university,” she continued. “What
we
need is some informed opinion … some light on the subject … some illumination, you see.”
    Tria didn’t look like she had much faith in the concept, or perhaps in my ability to deliver.
    “Tomorrow morning then, Mr.…?
    “Right,” I said. “Around one.”
    I was pleased to see, when Tria pulled away from the curb, that driving was now among
her
skills. It certainly hadn’t been the last time I’d seen her. She yanked the Chevette into traffic and turned at the corner with such authority that her mother grabbed the top of her head, as if to prevent an invisible hat from flying out the window. It seemed to me that Tria Ward might be angry at something. Maybe even something to do with me.
    The next day I was pretty glad that morning did not arrive at the Wards’ house until afternoon. F. William Peterson came over to the flat around eleven, and I heard him and my mother talking in subdued tones in the living room. My mother was of the opinion that I had spent the previous evening dazzling the dull local beauties. I never told her when I was planning to hook up with my father, of course. He always offered to come by and pick me up, but I said no, that I’d find him, and he understood well enough.
    “Well hello there, Mr. Debonair,” my mother said, when I finally dragged myself out of bed. She and F. William Peterson were drinking coffee on the same end of the sofa. “Do you know what momentous decision we’ve just arrived at?”
    “No, I don’t,” I said.
    “Brunch,” she said. “Corn bread muffins and sausage links.”
    “Sounds good,” I said, wondering what momentous decision they’d have arrived at if F. William Peterson had been allowed a say. “I hope you won’t mind me taking a rain check.”
    She gave me the tragic wounded look I expected, but, to my surprise, her face lit up when I said I’d been invited to brunch at the Wards’. “Ah!” she said. “Old line!”
    I frowned.
    “Well, not
Jack
Ward, of course. He was as plebeian as the next fellow, but his wife was a Smythe, one of the first families of Mohawk County,” she said. “Strictly old line.”
    “It’s a wonderful opportunity,” I said.
    “And Jack Ward cut quite a figure when he came back from overseas,” she remembered. “You should have seen him and your father in uniform.…”
    She stared off dreamily.
    “Take my car if you like,” F. William Peterson suggested.
    I had intended to take my father’s, since I knew where he kept the spare key to the Cadillac and since he probably wouldn’t be wanting it until midafternoon anyway. He and Wussy had dropped me off when the bars closed and said they were going home. I’m sure they did, eventually. The convertible was probably out in front of my father’s, but then again, it might be in one of half a dozen other places. So I closed the bathroom door on my mother’s frying sausage, shaved and showered, put on the only decent sweater I owned over a pair of khakis and drove F. William Peterson’s New Yorker out to the highway and up the narrow road that wound up through the trees to the Ward house.
    Seeing it again was a shock, so much so that I stopped the New Yorker just outside the stone pillars that marked the entrance to the circular drive and just sat. The white jewel house was little more than a big, fancy ranch of the sort that sat side by side, awaiting mature foliage, in the better Tucson housing developments. It was not nearly as nice as the house of the English professor whose house I’d played poker in the night before I left the city. And in the decade since I’d laid eyes on it, the Ward house hadtaken on a grayish tinge, as if it had suddenly begun to absorb the sunlight it had once so brilliantly reflected. The only improvement I