The Risk Pool

Ward’s place?” my father said when I described it.
    I doubted there could be more than one, so I said that was it. “What does he do?” I said, figuring he must have a pretty good business, like Rose’s.
    “Not a goddamn thing, that I know of,” my father said, not particularly interested. When he studied the racing form, he was hard to engage in idle chatter.
    “Where does it come from?” I said. “The money, I mean.”
    “Doesn’t come from anywhere. It’s just there.
Been
there for a hell of a while. You couldn’t spend it all if you tried.”
    I frowned at what seemed a silly observation. Of
course
you could
spend
it, I thought, and I said as much, too.
    My father shook his head. “You couldn’t do it,” he said.
    “Why not?”
    “You just couldn’t,” he elaborated. “Jack’s trying like hell, and even he can’t. Which means it can’t be done.”
    It turned out that Jack Ward was an old army buddy of my father’s who had married into about the wealthiest family in the county and become a rich man. Since then, according to my father, he was trying to become a poor one again by throwing away money with both fists. But every time he thought he was making headway he discovered there was even more money than he’d thought. “Like shoveling shit against the tide,” my father concluded pessimistically.
    It struck me as an interesting problem to have, nevertheless. It shed new light on the forty dollars my mother had had me bring from the bank every week for us to live on. It had seemed a large sum, and I’d always wished I could be master of it for just one week, because I was convinced I could make it go a lot farther than she did. In fact, with forty dollars to live on every week, I had always considered us pretty well-to-do. Maybe there wasn’t money for everything we wanted, but I had figured that was a pretty universal condition. Other people couldn’t be all that much better off. Admittedly, there were people with cars, new ones even, but my mother had given me to believe that the people who owned them made extraordinary sacrifices to afford this single luxury. The fact that we never owned a car was, I believed, a matter of choice. We did not
need
a car, and by not owning one, we were able to enjoy whatever it might be that other people who
did
own them sacrificed. My mother had never been specific about what other people sacrificed, but she insisted they did, and I believed her. When I brought up the Claudes, she just smiled knowingly, and I thought long and hard trying to discover just what secret sacrifices they must have made to maintain a car
and
a swimming pool. About the only other extravagant wealth I’d ever personally encountered was at the dining table in the rectory of Our Lady of Sorrows, but my mother said the church didn’t count. She was talking about
people
.
    The idea of having more money than you could spend tookadjusting to, and I considered it for a long time as I vacuumed brittle black hair off Rose’s red pile carpet, my father having fallen asleep in the chair with the racing form over his face. I tried to understand, but there were just too many holes in the theory.
    When I was finished, I turned off the noisy vacuum and my father started awake. “He could just
give
some away,” I ventured.
    “What?” my father rubbed his eyes.
    “The money,” I said. “If you couldn’t spend it all, you could give some to people who didn’t have any and let
them
spend some.”
    I could tell by the look on his face that it was a dumb suggestion, so I started on the sinks, sponging the circles of hair toward the drain until the porcelain glistened white. Then, together, we dusted the tables and rearranged the magazines and emptied the dozen or so small trash buckets. It was a long job, but with two of us working it went faster and, besides, I was getting paid. Not the sort of sum Jack Ward would have trouble spending, but a good-sized chunk by my own standards.
    “Take that trash down to the basement and you’re all done,” my father said.
    When I shouldered the big bag and headed for the back door, he stopped me and said not to be a dummy. I should use the elevator like a white man. When I pointed out that the grid was locked, he said I had a key, didn’t I? Well? And sure enough, the key I’d been given for the back door fit the lock on the gate, which lunged open when released as if on a well-greased, downhill track. I got on the elevator and pressed