The Risk Pool

that she didn’t think it would work out (my visiting on Saturday mornings) unless “we” could refrain from comments of that nature. It was hard enough for her to get well without somebody offering personal comments. It wasn’t much of a threat, of course. I don’t know who else would have cashed her meager checks, straightened out the mistakes made by her grocer, and purchased anything that required leaving the house.
    As it turned out, my mother’s gradual physical decline was not the only proscribed subject between us. Since she never responded to any information I chose to impart about my father or our lives together, I gradually understood that I was not to communicate anything of that sort. Of course I knew enough not to tell her anything troubling. Even when she was in perfect health, she never had been the sort of person to whom you confessed riding motorcycles. But I soon discovered that even carefully selected anecdotes about my father, ones calculated (even fabricated) to suggest that our life together was normal and healthy, were deeply disturbing to her, and it took me a long time to realize that among the myriad torments my mother suffered alone in her room, having given me over to the dubious care of my father was the keenest and the most deeply rooted. Any reminder of his existence caused her eyes to go dull and dead, and she would look away, at the wall, at the drawn window shade, at nothing at all. I think that for the purposes of her day-to-day reality she had constructed some sort of fable to account for my absence. Probably I was supposed to be away at some posh private school, and therefore able to visit only on weekends. Whatever. I know she particularly liked hearing about my triumphs at school, and these I began to manufacture with some ingenuity. Rigid slavishness to the truth had never been one of my particular vices, and it was during this period that my mother’s and my relationship was entirely rewritten, grounded firmly in kind falsehoods. It would never change again. For the rest of our lives I would lie and she would believe me.
    Once I got the hang of the fact that only lies gave her any measure of peace, I never told her the truth about anything again. I became a perfect son, creating what amounted to an alter ego for our own private edification, for I may as well confess that my lies were not completely altruistic, whether or not they had asalubrious effect on my mother. The worse my actual performances at school, the more glorious the academic achievements I reported to her. The more arrogant and aloof I became with regard to everything that happened at Nathan Littler Junior High, the greater stature I accepted in the totally fraudulent renderings I concocted for her. First, I became a member of the eighth grade council, then class president. I also became a case study in morality, returning examinations to my instructors who, out of understandable force of habit, had given me a perfect score when in fact I had achieved a mere 98.
    I was telling my poor mother all of this during the same period that I began to make weekly raids into Klein’s Department Store, using my key to Rose’s salon, then the elevator down into the dark basement, where I pressed the hold button and took the stairwell up into the store. The store itself was nearly as black as the basement I emerged from, the only illumination that which streamed in at odd angles from the streetlamps outside. Sometimes I did not even know what I was stealing until I got it upstairs.
    All that autumn, a Saturday morning at a time, I joined my mother in her murky bedroom and watched her decline, unable in any way to prevent it. By Thanksgiving, I was sure she was going to die.

14
    In the beginning I never went into the Mohawk Grill except in the company of my father. It was one of a dozen or so places (along with the pool hall and Clausen’s Cigar Store, where magazines with bare-breasted women were displayed in plain sight), that had been on my mother’s list of proscribed places. I remember that when I was a small child we had always crossed the street rather than pass directly in front of these dubious establishments. They were located on opposite sides of Main, and we must havelooked pretty funny tacking and veering, as if to avoid invisible obstacles. My mother disliked the sort of men that congregated in these doorways, though they spoke well of her, and loud enough so we could both hear, even as we were in