The Risk Pool

was gone, maybe for good.
    “Put her on a minute.”
    “She’s out … Christmas shopping actually.”
    “Then why’d you say she was there?”
    “I meant here in the city.”
    “Where the hell else would she be?”
    “Right,” I said. “I’m really glad about the news, Dad. I can’t believe it.”
    “Me either,” he said. “The only problem is the last treatment did something to my eyes. I suddenly can’t see worth a shit.”
    “What’s your doctor say?”
    “New glasses. Thick ones. I’d get them except things are a little tight right now …”
    “Listen,” I said. “Would a couple hundred help?”
    “You could if you wanted,” he said. I could see him shrugging on the other end of the line. “I don’t need them, really. There’s nothing in this town worth looking at, and not a goddamn thing I haven’t already seen a hundred times more than I wanted to.”
    So we left it that I’d send a check in the morning, not because he needed it, or because he wanted me to, but because I insisted. When we hung up, I discovered that instead of feeling elation, I was mildly, maybe even more than mildly, irritated with him. At first I thought it was because of the way he’d started out, saying he was “all done,” a phrase even my father must have realized invited the wrong interpretation. Then I thought maybe it was the business about the glasses, his stubborn unwillingness to accept help, his insistence that everybody understand that any consideration or concern or affection shown him was done purely for the edification of the giver. But the annoyance went even deeper, and I knew it as I stared out the apartment window and up into the darkening New York sky. My reflection in the glass allowed me a brief, horrible glance at what lay at the heart of things. Strangely enough, I’d been thinking about it for days, ever sinceI’d gone with Leigh to the airport and put her on the plane. What I’d been denying, even as I worried it like a scab, was the possibility that my father was the reason I was losing Leigh. I had made a terrible mistake, it occurred to me, in telling her all about him, of painting his portrait so vividly, of allowing her extended conversations with him on the phone. And I realized how grateful I was that circumstances had prevented their actual meeting. Had they done so, had Leigh been able to see my father and me standing shoulder to shoulder, she would at that moment have understood me, who I was, where I came from, all the things that—it now came home to me—I had been carefully concealing from her.
    In his own way my father had both understood and expressed what I’d been feeling in that long moment of silence that had followed the news of his cure. I was afraid that he would live to be a hundred.

44
    I didn’t go to Mohawk the week between Christmas and New Year’s, nor the week after that. To my surprise, Leigh called and said she was returning to the city the day before New Year’s. On the phone she sounded depressed, but refused to talk about her stay in Colorado. At the time I concluded that her mother must have been lurking nearby. I didn’t care, really. I was too happy to discover that Leigh was returning a week early—that she was returning at all—to press for details.
    At La Guardia, she seemed happy to see me and she did not object when I told her I’d made reservations for a late dinner that night. I had in mind that we would see the new year in quietly, privately. She looked tired though, and I insisted she take a nap when we got back to the apartment. She slept the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening. I didn’t go in until it wastime to dress or miss our reservation, and I found her there in the semidark, awake and thoughtful, and again, it seemed, glad to see me. We walked to the restaurant through wet, slow-motion snow that fell straight down and melted on impact everywhere except along the cast iron fences and window gratings. On the way Leigh told me she’d been to see a gynecologist in Denver and that it was his opinion that we’d miscalculated—she was nearly a month farther along than we’d thought, which explained a lot. February now, not March. In fact, she was noticeably larger, and she was carrying our child right out in front now, though still high. Perhaps because I could tell that it mattered to Leigh, I said I didn’t see what difference it made that we’d miscalculated, except that she was that much closer