The Risk Pool

decade after I came to New York. It came in the form of a newspaper clipping, a month old by the time I received it. ELDERLY WOMAN VICTIM OF CARNIVAL RIDE , the headline said in bold black letters, though the account beneath was slender. Miss Rachael Agajanian, a resident of the Mohawk Valley Nursing Home, had been one of a party taken on an outing to the Mohawk Fair. According to witnesses, her wheelchair had rolled backward off the merry-go-round when the attendant had gone to the aid of another resident of the home who, seated on one of the stationary benches, had unaccountably begun to scream. Miss Agajanian’s wheelchair had become entangled in the machinery and been dragged, with its occupant, several complete revolutions, before the ride, which had been left on automatic, could be stopped.
    The clipping from the
Mohawk Republican
was inside a small envelope; there was no note. When my father called a month later I asked him about the incident and, predictably, he had a lot more information than the newspaper account, and some of it may even have been true. The mangled old woman had beenrushed to the New Mohawk Medical Services Center, where the emergency room staff immediately began to attend to her. She had been quite a sight but the doctors and nurses did their best with her. Unfortunately, at some point, someone explained how the accident happened, that the old woman had been thrown from the merry-go-round, whereupon the entire team dissolved. Each time their hilarity was about to subside, someone else entered the room, looked at the patient and wanted to know what on earth had happened, setting everyone off again. This continued until the patient died.
    “Hell of a way to go,” my father said. “I bet she pissed in her pants that day.”
    “Listen,” I said. “Do you ever see Claude Schwartz around?”
    “That’s funny,” he said. “I heard something about him just the other day. The kid that hung himself, right? Worked at the post office?”
    I said that was Claude Schwartz.
    “He just took off one day about a month ago. Left his wife, kids, mother, all of them. Gave notice at the post office, cashed his last check and was gone. What kind of man does a thing like that?”
    Foolishly, I took this to be a rhetorical question.
    “Well?” my father said, his long distance voice full of genuine perplexity.

42
    From the living room I heard the shower thunk off, the glass door open and close. Leigh usually took long showers, which made me wonder if she’d heard the phone in there. “The timing isn’t so great, that’s all,” I told my father.
    “So don’t, then,” he said. “Come in a couple weeks when you’re straightened out. What’s the difference. I’ll be right here.”
    The bathroom door—the one off our bedroom—opened and Icaught a glimpse of her in the bedroom mirror, toweling her hair dry. Until Leigh, no woman had ever performed this womanly task in my presence. Had one done so, and looked the way Leigh did, her olive skin glistening, I think I’d have proposed marriage on the spot.
    “Will you need help moving?” I said.
    The sound of my voice caused her to pivot quickly and scoot behind the door until she could determine whether I was on the phone or we had company.
    “Moving what?” my father wanted to know.
    “Furniture.”
    “Haven’t got any,” he said. “I can carry my own suitcase, if I could find it.”
    “The new place is furnished?”
    “Will be,” he said. “That’s all taken care of. The furniture store delivers, so all I gotta do is be there and point. I may get somebody else to do that. Putting things where they should go was one of the things I could never do to suit your mother.”
    “Aren’t you glad you don’t have to suit her anymore?”
    “Yes, I am,” he said, but there was a wistful quality to his answer that suggested he might like to try pleasing, if not my mother, then some woman, just one more time, to see if it could be done.
    Leigh came out in her cotton robe and mouthed a “who?” at me.
    I cupped my hand over the phone. “Your father-in-law-to-be.” Then to him, “How’s next weekend?”
    “That’s the only one that won’t work,” he said. I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t, which was surprising. Usually such an opening produced a long, convoluted story, at the end of which you still wouldn’t know why next weekend was out. “Your honey there?”
    I told him she was and waved Leigh in from the