The Risk Pool

Monsignor separating us two liars. I ritually confessed that which I was not guilty of in order to make up for not confessing what I
was
guilty of, about the most heinous crime I could imagine. I was ten years old, and I had discovered by accident that an older woman of twelve undressed in front of her bedroom window every night precisely at ten, ten-thirty on weekends. She was apparently very proud of her small but clearly developing breasts, because she admired them every night, almost as much as I did, before slipping over them a pastel nightgown. I dreaded the night she would discover the error of her two-thirds-drawn window shade, and was much older when it occurred to me for the first time, a blinding revelation, that the lovely little minx probably knew perfectly well my hot ten-year-old breath was fogging the bedroom window opposite hers. When her family packed their belongings and moved to Florida a year later, I felt a sense of loss rarely paralleled in adult life, though by then her performances had grown less frequent, even as her breasts had grown more worthy of adoration.
    I cannot imagine that my confessions impressed the good Monsignor, but for one reason or another, I was made an altar boy, and thereby brought into the inner sanctum of the church behind the lighted sacristy door. It was a profound disappointment. Nothing mysterious happened there, and if any plotting was done, I wasn’t privy to it. The old Monsignor dressed in silence and spoke onlyfrom the altar and to the entire congregation. I soon realized that my selection did not mean that I was more holy, more worthy, more intelligent, or more fully catechized than the twenty or so boys passed over for the honor. My initiation into the ritual of fishing had been far more satisfying, and Wussy a far more amiable teacher, his tendency toward gunshot flatulence notwithstanding, than the old Monsignor, who said scarcely two words to me, leaving matters of instruction to the older boys. I thought things would change when I started serving weekday masses, where only one altar boy attended, but by then I knew what I was doing and the old priest had even less to say to me. From out in the congregation it had seemed that the boys on the altar were busy and essential to the service, but now I saw that the old Monsignor ran the whole shebang himself. At least with Wussy I had caught a fish.
    Things looked up, however, when Our Lady of Sorrows was assigned a young priest named Father Michaels to relieve some of the burden of duties from our aging and allegedly infirm pastor. Though not a large man, the new priest was a very handsome one, with longish brown hair and dark eyes. His hands and fingers were slender, like a woman’s, and just as white. Otherwise, the only truly notable thing about him was that he perspired terribly in all weather. He had been with us only a few weeks when the old Monsignor ordered all new outer vestments, very costly ones that priests within a parish often share, and made a present of the old darkening ones to the embarrassed young priest. Father Michaels always carried a thick cloth handkerchief with him when he said mass, secreting it on the altar behind the Bible stand, a respectful distance from the holy tabernacle, using it several times during the course of proceedings to mop his glistening forehead and neck.
    Father Michaels was very conscious of his perspiring, and on Sundays, when there were sometimes half a dozen irreverent altar boys on hand to remark the fact, he sweated even more profusely than during the week. When he distributed Communion, with me preceding him backward along the altar rail, gently inserting the gold communion paten beneath the urgent chins of the faithful in case their tongues did not accept cleanly the sacred host, the sweat actually dripped from the tip of the young priest’s nose, plinking onto the gold plate, like rain into a tin gutter.
    We took to each other right off. Unlike the Monsignor, who wasalways in the sacristy no matter how early I arrived and who managed to convey the impression that boys were undependable by nature and that he would probably have to do my work—lighting the candles, cleaning out the censer and making sure it contained a fresh lump of charcoal, toting the big red Bible up the pulpit steps—Father Michaels often blew into the sacristy through the side door ten minutes before mass was supposed to begin, blinking, tired, and mussed, as if he’d just been