The Risk Pool

else would he be bothering with me, giving me rides on the cycle when he could just as easily have been acting as chauffeur to one or more of his slightly overweight, dirty-haired girlfriends, all of whom nuzzled into the small of his back with large breasts. Maybe the men at the diner knew too. I tried to remember which of them had shown me special kindness recently, and the more I thought about it, the more evidence I came up with. Some of it was several months old, but there was no telling how long that sign had been on the terrace. Perhaps my mother’s death was old news. Maybe they’d already forgotten the secret they’d been sworn to keep from me. Many of them were men who forgot their own families without even being asked to. By now they’d probably forgotten my mother had ever existed.
    That night, when we were alone in the apartment, watching the eleven o’clock news, my father in his shorts, scratching himself thoughtfully, I told him I wanted to visit my mother on Sunday. My voice must have sounded odd, because he looked at me before answering.
    “Why not,” he said.
    “I mean it,” I said.
    I watched for a reaction, but there wasn’t any. Not that I should have expected one. In Liars my father could call six deuces without a single one in his hand for comfort and his expression would remain distant, abstracted, almost bored. Was it possible, though, that he didn’t know? Was it possible that my mother was so insignificant that she had died in Schenectady and no one had taken the trouble to inform us? After all, we had no telephone in the apartment, and I wasn’t sure the nursing home even had our address. Our mailbox inside the dark hallway below didn’t even have the name Hall on it and the mailman didn’t even bother to stuff it with junk mail. Anybody who wanted to contact my father left a message at Harry’s or Greenie’s or at the Littlers’ or one of his other haunts. Probably legal wheels were turning, my mother’s estate being settled by some downstate law office where no one knew of my father and me, or, if they’d heard rumors of our existence, could find no listing, no official record of it. If so, we deserved it, my father and I. No doubt some dark-suited man had appeared at the nursing home with a notepad, ready to take down information. Had my mother any relatives? Visitors? Surely
some
one came to see her? Leaned forward to kiss her hollow cheek? No, the good nurse would have been forced to admit. She had been alone. Died alone.
    “You better get a haircut then,” my father said, looking me overagain, vaguely dissatisfied with what he saw, but unable to identify whatever else might be required to make me presentable to a woman who, assuming he thought her to be alive, he had no reason to believe would be other than diminished, withdrawn, sedated, or comatose, but whom he preferred to remember as beautiful, easily angered, possibly armed, and bearing a grudge.
    As I look back upon this period of my life from something like objective distance, what strikes me as strange and more than a little horrifying is the ease with which I had managed to banish my mother, to push her into some far recess of my consciousness. Most of the time I simply did not think of her.
    The only case I can make in my own defense is that I don’t think I was being extraordinarily cavalier or unfeeling. I know I loved her and feared for her. I banished her from the forefront of my mind for the same reason and by the same mechanism by which I willed myself to sleep through my father’s nightly assaults on our house when I was a little boy, at which time I simply could not
afford
to consider them. Any more than I could now afford to consider my mother’s horrible condition in the nursing home, or of what in the end would happen to her. At least I could not think of these things on a daily basis.
    There were times, however, during the long months between visits, that she would sweep over me in waves of memory, and I would feel terrible guilt, guilt so intense that I wished not to be alive. But after a while I’d succeed in filing her safely away again. Seeing the For Sale sign had sent me plummeting into the worst depression I’d ever experienced and my emotional state must have been apparent even to my father, who decided that Saturday afternoon, the day before the promised visit, that we’d go out to dinner someplace nice to cheer me up, or, failing that, be around other people who might be