Free The Risk Pool by Richard Russo Page A

after mass, we usually had breakfast in the high-ceilinged rectory dining room. I’d never seen so much food at a morning meal. At home, my mother had neither thetime nor the inclination to cook breakfast before going to work, so usually all I got was a sugar donut or buttered graham cracker. At the rectory, Mrs. Ambrosino, a widow of advancing middle age, who had cooked for the Monsignor since the death of her husband, brought on huge platters of food that filled the long rectory table. Except on Fridays, there were bacon and sausage, and sometimes ham, along with towers of toast, half a dozen eggs fried in butter, pitchers of juice and milk and bowls of fruit. You could have pancakes if you asked for them. There was so much food and so much of it went unconsumed that for a long time I was under the impression that company was anticipated which kept failing to show up. The old Monsignor, even before his health began to fail, had never been a prodigious eater, and most mornings he could be induced to eat little more than half a grapefruit, which contributed, in my opinion, to his sour disposition. That left the rest of the feast to Father Michaels and me. My friend ate like he did everything else, nervously, and I often felt that he would have eaten more and enjoyed it better if he’d felt entitled to it. But eating with genuine good appetite is no easy thing when you are seated at the opposite end of a long table from a man who makes it a point of moral significance to subsist on half a grapefruit, eaten in under a minute so that the bowl could be pushed emphatically away, another duty done. It’s not nearly so hard when you’re a boy seated halfway down the table, directly in front of the bacon and sausage and influenced more by aroma than moral statements. I ate like a dog.
    “Ned,” my friend would say, using his cloth napkin to mop his forehead before placing it in the middle of his plate, “you’re a wonder.”
    Mrs. Ambrosino apparently thought so too, though she derived no satisfaction from the fact that
somebody
was eating the food she prepared. As far as she was concerned, nobody counted but the old pastor. Father Michaels she ignored as if he did not exist, despite his repeated compliments on her cooking. She was not cooking for the handsome young interloper any more than for the urchin he had, for reasons known only to himself, allowed to invade the sanctity of the rectory. Everything she did was for
the
father, the old Monsignor, who had officiated at every important religious ceremony in her lifetime, the last being her husband’s funeral. She had not always been a religious woman, though she was one now. As a young woman she had lived with the man sheeventually married while they waited for his wife to oblige them by dying, which she eventually did. Mrs. Ambrosino had been wild then, as wild as any girl in Mohawk, uncontrollable in her passion for that awful woman’s husband, but when she finally got him the passion leaked away, and now her only passion was for the old priest’s health, which she equated with eating. “
Mangia
,” she implored him, hemming him in with platters of food, many of them rich delicacies searched out and ordered all the way from New York City to tempt him back to health. “Keep up your spirit.”
    “Good Mrs. Ambrosino,” the old man responded. “It is not a question of spirit but of cholesterol. Your husband died of lasagne. An avoidable fate.”
    As a matter of principle, however, the old priest had no objection to the overabundance of food, though he himself had no intention of eating it. A pastor for nearly forty years at Our Lady of Sorrows, he liked to keep up appearances. The rectory and church were freshly painted on alternate years, and a large part of the collection money went to upkeep. A full-time grounds-keeper was employed to tend carefully planted, cross-shaped flower beds on the main lawn, and the hedges and weeping willows were kept manicured. In the