The Risk Pool

father, who went into his lawyer diatribe, the one he’d so often directed against F. William Peterson, at the slightest provocation. But no more. How could he, with Boyle seated two stools down, and Sam Hall the only working stiff in the joint.
    When we got downtown, my father parked Smooth’s Lincoln across from the Mohawk Grill (Smooth had his office two doors down, on Main) and we crossed the street. The diner was the only establishment the length of the street that was open, but for some reason a young woman was coming toward us from the direction of the Four Corners. She was pushing an unhappy infant in a tattered stroller and had two small grubby children in tow. At first I did not recognize Claude Schwartz’s wife, though she had not changed significantly in either looks or expression.
    When I stopped to say hello—I wouldn’t have, except I feared she had recognized me too—my father went on into the diner, leaving the two of us in the street with the crying infant and the two quiet, staring, older children.
    “You know what he done,” the girl said, as if she meant to suggest that Claude, in abandoning them, had been acting on my explicit instructions.
    I said I had heard and felt myself flush, perhaps because of the fact that if Claude
had
asked my opinion, I might very well have given this counsel.
    “I knew he wasn’t no good,” she said. “His own mother says so. He caught me on the rebound or it never would have happened.”
    I resisted the impulse to ask her what she had been on the rebound from, for she was, I’m sorry to say, the most physically repulsive young woman I’d ever met, the kind any sensible man would flee from before he’d made any sad-eyed, hopeful kids to be drawn along in her awful wake.
    “You ever see the weasel, do me a favor and give him a message for me,” she began, but I held up my hand and said that I wasn’t so great about remembering messages and that I doubted I’d be running into Claude.
    Inside, my father had already ordered by the time I slid onto the stool next to him. “Who’s she?” he wanted to know. When I told him, he nodded. “How’d you like to wake up next to that for the rest of your life?”
    For some reason, despite my aversion to her, I felt an odd impulse to defend Lisa Schwartz, though I didn’t know why or even how. And when Harry came over and asked me what I wanted, I didn’t know the answer to that either.
    During the long months of my father’s chemotherapy, I made no mention to him of Leigh’s pregnancy. If he thought it strange that she never came with me to Mohawk, he never said so. After all, he had just the small one-bedroom, and the couch I slept on in the living room was not a convertible sofa, like all the old Sam Hall couches had been. He may even have concluded that my visits were selfishly motivated. Most of the men he knew—indeed, most of the men he’d known all his life—had learned to prefer the company of men after they were married, and many of them had elevated to an art form the process of not going home until they were good and ready. Whenever the phone rang behind the bar in Mohawk gin mills, a motley chorus—“I’m not here,” “I left ten minutes ago,” “You ain’t seen me in weeks”—went up along the bar. It’s entirely possible that my father interpreted my alwaysarriving alone as evidence that I was training Leigh right, the way he wished he’d trained my mother.
    And, in fact, there
was
an element of selfishness to my frequent weekends in Mohawk. Leigh and I did fairly well during the week. She was still working and she headed uptown early in the morning, leaving the apartment quietly, so as not to wake me. I habitually read late into the night, rose late in the morning, arriving uptown in time for luncheon meetings with writers and marketing people and other editors. Then I typically worked at the office until nine or ten at night, when Leigh and I would share a late supper, the day’s anecdotes and outrages, and, even now, frequently, our bed. The crowded day was what Leigh seemed to need, and I missed her far too much during that day to spend what little time we had in the evenings quarreling.
    Weekends were different, though. I looked forward to them, but they almost never turned out well. With forty-eight uninterrupted hours before us, it always seemed to me that Leigh might be persuaded to change her mind by Monday morning. She must have feared the same thing, because come