The Risk Pool

studies, gambling compulsively, suicidally. And I had simply walked away from the mess. Now, sitting pleasantly on the Wards’ charmed little patio, with just enough breeze to flutter the umbrella overhead, surrounded by Skinny Donovan’s fragrant flowers, and in the company of a young woman every bit as fresh and fragrant as the surrounding bloom, it seemed to me that life was extraordinarily forgiving. I felt lucky again and there was no Lanny Aguilar around to be pissed off by my good fortune. Vietnam itself seemed relegated to the television, without local ramification, as if a town that never got to participate in the good fortune of the fifties felt no need to suffer the tragedy of the seventies. I decided that as far as I was concerned, walking away was an underrated talent, probably genetic in origin. My father had written the book on walking away from things before I ever came along. Perhaps luck was his gift to me. If so, I was grateful. After all, I could just as easily have taken after my mother, who had never walked away from anything, who paid and paid, compound interest, the principal always outstanding. This legacy she herself had inherited from her own father, who had considered himself lucky to come home from the war riddled with malaria, to break even in the cold earth of Mohawk.
    I wondered what my grandfather, who had made his peace with ill fortune, who had accepted winter with a capital W as the essence of human existence, would have thought about me, with my 348, with the even luckier temperament that might well have allowed me to walk north into Canada or south into Mexico if I had failed in the luck of the draw. Maybe he’d have been happy for my disposition. I’d been told often enough that he had little use for my father, and it was reasonable to assume that he’d have had a fair number of reservations about me. But his life and thought had come to me filtered through my mother, so there was no way to tell for sure. Any more than there was a way to tellwhether he had ever spent an enchanted afternoon such as this under a sun that promised summer with a capital
S
.
    It was not truly summer though, and when a white cloud obscured the sun, the air was suddenly chill and we were forced inside, leaving behind the petrified remains of our eggs in hollandaise sauce. The room we adjourned to was the small, book-lined study where Jack Ward had deposited me and from which the horrible frizzy-haired woman had stolen
Gone with the Wind
. The room was exactly as I remembered it, the large mantel and many of the shelves sporting photographs, including the one of a young Hilda Ward in the company of the distinguished-looking man with thinning hair, another of Tria, I presumed, balancing uncomfortably on this same man’s knee. There had been no photographic evidence of Jack Ward’s existence in the room ten years ago and there wasn’t any now.
    Tria watched me intently as her mother took down from the place of honor on the mantel the leatherbound volume that had attracted my attention as a boy. Mrs. Ward hesitated there at the altar before turning back to us, book in hand, and when she did her expression could only be described as religious. I half expected her to open the volume and begin to read aloud. Instead, she cleared her voice and said, “Mr. Hall. I wonder if you would be so good as to give us your professional opinion of this work. As an historian.”
    “Like I said—” I began.
    “And as a graduate of the university.” The book was between us now, occupying space that was neither the old woman’s nor mine. There was nothing I could do but reach out and take the book, and so when Tria nodded, I did. Even so, there was a moment when we both had a hold of the damned thing, and when I drew it toward me, as I imagined I was supposed to, I encountered resistance in the fierce old fingers that did not want to surrender it. They did though, eventually, causing us both a momentary loss of equilibrium.
    Once I had the volume—
The History of Mohawk County from the Earliest Times to the Present
, by William Henry Smythe—it occurred to me that I hadn’t any idea what I was supposed to do with it. The way we were all facing each other in the middle of the small room gave the impression that I was expected to read it standing up, beginning to end, and render a judgment as soon as I’d finished. It seemed Mrs. Ward’s clear intention was to standthere and watch me read it, gauging my