The Risk Pool

her life.
    They may have departed my mother’s, but my father and grandfather remained the two pivotal figures in my own young life. Of the two, the grandfather I had no recollection of was the more vivid, thanks to my mother. By the time I was six I was full of lore concerning him, and now, at age thirty-five, I can still quote him chapter and verse. “There are four seasons in Mohawk,” he always remarked (in my mother’s voice). “Fourth of July, Mohawk Fair, Eat the Bird, and Winter.” No way around it, Mohawk winters did cling to our town tenaciously. Deep into spring, when tulips were blooming elsewhere, brown crusted snowbanks still rose high from the terraces along our streets, and although yellow water ran along the curbs, forming tunnels beneath the snow, the banks themselves shrank reluctantly, and it had been known to snow cruelly in May. It was late June before the ground was firm enough for baseball, and by Labor Day the sun had already lost its conviction when the Mohawk Fair opened. Then leper-white-skinned men, studies in congenital idiocy, hooked up the thick black snake-cables to a rattling generator that juiced The Tilt-A-Whirl, The Whip, and The Hammer. Down out of the hills they came, these white-skinned men with stubbled chins, to run the machines and leer at the taut blue faces of frightened children, leaning heavily and more heavily still on the metal bar that hurtled us faster and faster. When the garish colored lights of the midway, strung carelessly from one wooden pole to the next came down that first Tuesday morning in September, you could feel winter in the air. Fourth of July, Mohawk Fair, Eat the Bird, and Winter. I was an adult before I realized how cynical my grandfather’s observation was, his summer reduced to a single day; autumn to a third-rate mix of carnival rides, evil-smelling animals, mud and manure; Thanksgiving reduced to an obligatory carnivorous act, a “foul consumption,” he termed it; the rest Winter, capitalized. These became the seasons of my mother’s life after she realized the truth of my father’s observation about the pussy market. She worked for the telephone company and knew all about places with better seasons. At the end of the day she told me about the other operators she’d chatted with in places like Tucson, Arizona; and Albuquerque, New Mexico; and San Diego,California; where they capitalized the word Summer. “Someday …” she said, allowing her voice to trail off. “Someday.” Her inability to find a verb (or a subject, for that matter: I? We?) to give direction to her thought puzzled me then, but I’ve since concluded she didn’t truly believe in the existence of Tucson, Arizona, or perhaps didn’t believe that her personal seasons would be significantly altered by geographical considerations. She had inherited my grandfather’s modest house, and that rooted her to the spot. Its tiny mortgage payments were a blessing, because my mother was not overpaid by the telephone company. But the plumbing and electrical system were antiquated, and she was never able to get far enough ahead to do more than fix a pipe or individual wall socket. And of course the painters, roofers, electricians, and plumbers all saw her coming. So she subscribed to
Arizona Highways
and we stayed put.
    Until I was six I thought of my father the way I thought of “my heavenly father,” whose existence was a matter of record, but who was, practically speaking, absent and therefore irrelevant. My mother had filed for divorce the day after my grandfather’s funeral, but she didn’t end up getting it. When he heard what she was up to, my father went to see her lawyer. He didn’t exactly have an appointment, but then he didn’t need one out in the parking lot where he strolled back and forth, his fists thrust deep into his pockets, his steaming breath visible in the cold, waiting until F. William Peterson, Attorney-At-Law, closed up. It was one of the bleak dead days between Christmas and New Year’s. I don’t think my mother specifically warned F. William there would be serious opposition to her design and that the opposition might conceivably be extralegal in nature. F. William Peterson had been selected by my mother precisely because he was not a Mohawk native and did not know my father. He had moved there just a few months before to join as a junior partner a firm which employed his law school roommate. I imagine he had already begun to doubt his