The Risk Pool

another.” She waved her hand in disgust. “I just read the same books over and over.
From Here to Eternity
.”
    I said I knew what she meant.
    “Twenty-four, twenty-eight, thirty years old. And they think they know how we felt. Why do they pretend they understand us?”
    “I don’t know,” I told her.
    “Of course you don’t. How could you? How old are you?”
    “Thirty-four,” I admitted.
    “There,” she said. “How could you write about the Second World War?”
    “My father was part of the Normandy invasion, actually,” I said, unsure whether this intelligence would mollify or further inflame her. Her proscription against my writing about what she considered her war was entirely unnecessary, but I wasn’t sure she’d believe me if I told her. She’d suspect that I was secretly doing it anyway.
    “You listen to him then,” she said. “Maybe you’ll learn.”
    “I’m sure of it,” I told her. “He never talks about it though.”
    “Why should he?” the good woman wanted to know. “The ones who
saw
, the ones who
did
, they aren’t talkers. It’s the others who are the talkers.”
    Her implication was clear. I was a talker. She could tell. If I wrote a book, she wouldn’t read it.
    “Do you know what I do?” she said. “I look at copyright dates. If it’s written after 1955….” she waved goodbye to it.
    When we pulled into the station in Poughkeepsie, she took my hand and squeezed, suddenly full of goodwill. “It’s like Frank Sinatra says. To look at us, you couldn’t always tell what was in our heads, but you always knew where our hearts were.”
    The woman’s eyes had gone misty and I could tell that her heart was somewhere, all right, and it wasn’t Poughkeepsie either. After her departure I had the two seats to myself, but I kept thinking about the woman. In some ways she reminded me of my mother and the other women I’d known whose lives were compromised by the war and who now felt an odd affection for its memory and guarded their loss against new assailants. My mother had more than once remarked that my father was one of the war’s casualties, that the Sam Hall who came back wasn’t the one who left, the one she’d fallen in love with. I didn’t doubt that she believed this simple truth or even that it
was
true, after a fashion. But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth—that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimesdon’t know people as well as we think we do, that the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely. That was almost certainly true in my mother’s case. The Sam Hall she’d fallen in love with was only narrowly based on a real person. The war, their separation, had encouraged a kind of poetic license where he was concerned. If he hadn’t come home, he’d have remained the love of her life. It seemed probable to me that my companion on the bus had lost someone, and that the loss had changed everything, created a truth that could not be modified, only accepted, reread.
    I didn’t envy the woman her text etched in stone. No good editor would. And yet there was something to be said for permanence. At thirty-four, there was precious little in my own life. I’d succeeded in falling in love with and getting pregnant the girl with whom I had been living for nearly a year, who had permitted, even encouraged, every decent intimacy engaged in by consenting adults, who looked forward to bearing, delivering, and raising our child, but who steadfastly drew the line at the prospect of a lifetime of my company. I tried to think of a good way to explain all this to my father, but the trip between Poughkeepsie and Mohawk wasn’t nearly long enough, and when we pulled up in front of the cigar store on the Four Corners, I’d made exactly no progress.
    I had decided against phoning him back to say that I was coming for the weekend after all. I thought now about calling from the cigar store and having him come fetch me, since his new apartment was twenty or so blocks away, but the evening was cool and my bag was light, containing little more than two days’ change of clothing. So I walked up Main past the Mohawk Grill, which had closed for the night, along with everything else but the gin mills. The biggest change on Main was that Klein’s Department Store was closed and boarded up, three stories’ worth of windows all black and lifeless. There was no more Accounting