The Risk Pool

for the swift exchange of secrets, the quick acknowledgment of present realities (this is my daughter, this is my son), of past realities (are we lucky bastards or are we lucky bastards? what the hell were the odds we’d be in Mohawk sharing a beer in 1960?).
    It was doubly odd that I spent so much time thinking about Jack Ward, because I always went up into Myrtle Park to think about Tria, with whom I now counted myself in love. The trouble I had was coming up with fantasy scenarios. How would I ever see her again? Where? Was it possible to infiltrate the private and parochial schools that were her future? Would my father and I be eating dinner at The Elms some night and, seeing Jack Ward and his lovely child in the doorway, wave them over to our table? And would they condescend to make a happy foursome, the Halls and the Wards, Jack and Sam to exchange war stories, Tria and Ned left to play footsie beneath the table?
    The above story line was so rickety that I couldn’t hold its lovely focus, and as the summer progressed, I discovered that I couldn’t even remember exactly what Tria Ward had looked like—only that she had been more beautiful than any girl I had ever seen. Most annoying was the cruelty of my perversely selective memory. What kind of sense did it make for me to remember every expression and gesture of the
father
of the girl I loved, when her own beloved face became daily more vague, little more than an ill-defined value judgment? It didn’t matter. The white jewel house, shimmering magically in the afternoon sun, contained them both, and it was a long way away.
    When he didn’t get waylaid, my father usually wheeled up in front of the Mohawk Grill around four-thirty in the afternoon. I tried to be there myself about that time, so I’d get some kind of idea what was on tap for the evening, whether he’d be around or not, always assuming he knew himself. Usually there would be somebody, or a couple of somebodies who’d intercept him between the curb and the door of the Mohawk Grill, sometimes to let him know about a game upstairs, or a sure thing at Aqueduct, or touch him for a quick five. But eventually he’d make it in, cuff me in the back of the head and say, “Well?” Then he’d want to get a number down and off we’d go in search of Untemeyer, after promising Harry we’d be back for dinner.
    “You know that Schwartz kid?” he asked me one afternoon after our ritual greeting.
    “Claude?” I said. I’d neither seen nor thought of him since school got out.
    “His old man runs the factory out in Meco?”
    I said that was the one.
    “Tried to commit suicide this afternoon,” he said. “Hung himself, the crazy son of a bitch.”
    A lunatic discussion ensued. Several people in the diner had heard of the event, or overheard somebody talking about it, just as they’d overheard my father’s mention of it to me.
    “Schwartz,” somebody said. “Bernie Schwartz?”
    “Bernie Schwartz is older than
you
. This was some kid.”
    “Maybe it was Bernie’s kid,” the original speaker suggested.
    “Bernie never had no kids and he never run no factory in Meco. Other than that, it could have been Bernie.”
    Everybody laughed.
    “It was Clyde Schwartz,” my father said, getting it wrong, but close. “Third Avenue they live, somewhere.”
    “There’s no Jews on Third Avenue. My wife lives up on Third Avenue.”
    “It’s Clyde Schwartz,” my father insisted. “And they live on Third Avenue, I’m telling you.”
    “What’s he want to kill himself for if he owns a factory?”
    “It’s not him, it’s his kid. Clean your ears.”
    “The Schwartzes live on Division Street, all of them. Right by the west entrance to the park. Except for Randy over on Mill.”
    The door opened and Skinny shuffled in, filthy and smelling of fertilizer from an afternoon in the Monsignor’s flower beds.
    “Hey, Skineet,” my father hailed him. “Where does Clyde Schwartz live?”
    “Third Avenue,” Skinny said, happy to be deferred to in this local matter. “He damn near cooked his own goose today.”
    “Not him,” my father said. “His kid.”
    “No, him is what I heard. Tried to string himself up from the ramada in his backyard.”
    “From the what?”
    “I heard it was the kid,” my father said, unsure of himself now.
    “Couldn’t be,” Skinny said. “He tied a rope to the roof andjumped off the picnic table. Neighbor looked out the window and saw him standing there on his