The Risk Pool

recently, I would have scoffed at such a notion. After all, I was my mother’s son, not his. He drifted into and out of our lives without influencing them unduly. We lived in a clean house on a nice street and we had what we needed. But things were changing, and I knew that they were, even though I could only guess why. Since that Sunday when Father Michaels left church by the side door, my mother had lost ground an inch at a time. When she was finally let go by the telephone company, she appeared almost relieved, and we lived for months on her modest savings account before she even began to look for work. When she came home from interviews, her hands shook so badly she had to sit on them, and there were days when she would not come out of her bedroom until midafternoon. She refused to go back to the doctor for more Librium, and without church to calm her down, she didn’t know where to turn.
    When the savings account money was gone and she’d quit making a pretense of looking for work, she telephoned F. William Peterson, who came to see us. His big gray car took up most of the curb outside our house. Before he actually came inside, he walked all around the place, studied the house and shed, the littleyard. When he finally came in, I was sent out and they talked for a long time.
    “You’re making a big mistake,” I heard him tell my mother later when they came out on the porch. I was fielding grounders along the side of the house.
    “I just need some time,” I heard her say.
    “You need help, Jenny,” F. William Peterson said. He had only a few strands of baby-fine hair left on top, and these required constant smoothing.
    Then for a while there was money again; I did not fully understand how. There wasn’t a lot, though, and my mother watched what there was carefully, cutting back on the amount we ate and the extras we purchased. Every other week she called the bank with instructions to cash a check I would be bearing within the half hour. She herself never left the house.

8
    That same summer I made a dubious friend. Compared to some of the other dubious friends who followed, Claude was harmless enough. By an odd coincidence, his family had bought Aunt Rose’s old house, and Claude hadn’t had time to make many friends, not that time was the issue. Mohawk was far from friendly to outsiders, and whatever it took to break into clique-riddled Mohawk High Claude didn’t possess, and he gave up after about a week. I was having similar difficulties in my first year at Nathan Littler Junior High. Claude was a big kid, but pear-shaped and soft-looking like his father, whose Connecticut employer had punished him with a transfer to Mohawk, where he supervised the manufacture of small, plastic, lime-green swimming pools in the shape of turtles. Claude’s mother badgered her son about his weight, but Claude Sr. always took the boy’s part. “He’s built like his father,” he told her proudly, not sensing that it was preciselythis that his wife would have prevented if she could. “Going to be a big man.” Then he tousled, or tried to, the close-cropped hair on the boy’s small head. He might as well have tousled a volleyball.
    Aunt Rose’s little house had always been one of the prettiest on the block, with bright green shutters and window boxes, and a small white fence, the sort you can easily step over, bordering the front and back yards. Claude’s parents immediately set about improving the property, even as their neighbors looked on malevolently. The two-story addition nearly doubled the size of Aunt Rose’s modest little dwelling, making it the biggest house on the block. But when the heavy machinery arrived a second time and began to scoop out large hunks of earth for what could be nothing but an in-ground swimming pool of immodest proportion, the neighbors circulated a petition to prevent its completion, claiming that it would be a hazard to the neighborhood children, who often cut cross-lots when they played. The real reason was that such ostentation had never been permitted in our neighborhood. The only pools in Mohawk were over on Kings Road by the golf course, and the wealthy Jewish section on the northwestern slope of Myrtle Park.
    Claude’s parents were Jews, as I later discovered, though so thoroughly reformed as not to practice their religion at all. Indeed, Claude’s father had expressed thoroughgoing distaste for Judaism’s more orthodox adherents, a sentiment he had hoped in vain