That he'd done the right thing and given her everything she asked for, so she wouldn't raise such a stink that he'd have to leave town maybe along with a lot of other people. Bad enough he was washed-up in politics; if he let that stuff hit the fan he would've had to forget the college job, too."
He paused. "I think Geoff Cohen might've even had that case."
"He did," the judge said. "Sam Evans from our shop represented Dan.
Sam was the divorce specialist. He was extremely good at it. Up until that case, consensus was he was the very best around He couldn't make divorce fun, but if you had to go through one and you could get Sam Evans, at least you could relax a little knew you were in good hands.
Top-notch negotiator; meticulous about details; scrupulously honest and a complete gentleman to boot.
"After the Hilliard case was over, Sam was almost inconsolable He said with all the sexual misconduct Hilliard had against him there'd been nothing he could do; he'd never had a chance The only hope that he'd had was that Geoff d make the kind of dumb mistake young lawyers sometimes make out of inexperience, and give Sam something he could use.
"Didn't happen. Sam said Geoff d known exactly what he had to work with; played his cards perfectly; made no mistakes at all and as a result ended up cleaning Sam's clock for him. After that in this part of the world there were two "best divorce lawyers around." In fact what Sam said about Geoff was what made me hire him. Sam'd gotten close to Ray during that racetrack deal-I thought it'd be too hard for him."
Then she frowned. "Who's the poor guy they're trying to make sink Dancin' Dan? Anyone else I might know?"
"I don't know," Robey said, 'you might. His name's Ambrose Merrion.
Canterbury District Court clerk. Ever got a speeding ticket on the way north to ski on something steeper than you've got right where you live?"
"I don't ski," she said. "People fall down doing that. Break their legs and stuff."
"Not if they know what they're doing," Robey said. "Anyway that's how I met him. Trooper wrote me up for eighty on Route Three-ninety-one in Cumberland. The other way to meet him's being active in politics. All the real Democratic insiders around here, all the way up to the state, even national, level: all of them would know him, know him very well. I doubt any one of them's ever paid a ticket in Amby's district."
"Did you pay yours?" the judge said.
"Truthfully? No, I didn't," Robey said. "It went, away. But not because of my secret life as a Democratic honcho. And not because I tried to fix it, either. The time when I got stopped up there for being in a big hurry, Marie and I were on our way to Montreal. Some friends from when she was at McGill; she hadn't seen most of them since she'd graduated, so naturally she was all keyed up. But I was excited too. This was going to be the best vacation wed ever had. Couldn't wait to get there's why I was driving so fast. I told the cop that in fact I hadn't realized how fast I had been going. Either he didn't believe me or that wasn't a good-enough excuse he wrote me up.
"I probably put being stopped completely out of my mind before we even crossed the state line into Vermont. And when we got home from those two-glorious-weeks-of-packed-powder, I didn't have the ticket. It was gone. I don't know what I did with it. I may've figured I'd get a summons in the mail; when it came I'd pay the ticket. But the summons never came. And of course I didn't notice because who thinks about a bill that never came? Then about, I dunno, three or four years ago, 'fore I started working for you, I got stopped again. On the Mass Pike on the way to Worcester. Paul McCartney concert at the Centrum:
Marie's a big fan of his. We're running late, as usual, so I was speeding, as usual. Got bagged for eighty-five. Suddenly it all comes back to me. Cop's back in the cruiser with my license, registration, punching his computer, and I'm thinking: "Oh my God, I never paid the one I got going up to Montreal. This cop's going to see there's a warrant out on me and he's going to put me in jail."
"But it didn't happen. Except for the fact I was getting another ticket costing me about a hundred-fifty bucks, and now we're really late for Paul McCartney, everything's perfectly fine.
"I couldn't understand it. The next day I called up the court in Canterbuaf and asked about it. Not that I like paying speeding tickets so much I go out looking for 'em when they get lost, but I was worried.
I didn't want it hanging over me.
"I gave my name, not what I do, and the woman asked me to wait while she got Mister Merrion. He came on and I told him the reason for my call, and he said: "Oh, yeah, of course, Judge Folkard's clerk. Forget it. It went away." '"Went away?" I said. "What do you mean?" '"I disappeared it," he said. He sounded like it was routine.
'"But why?" I said. "You don't know me. Did someone call you or something?" "Cause Judge Folkard'd been known to do that a few times, when his daughter got caught flying low coming home from New York. He was from the Old School, back when people did those things and didn't think a thing about it. I thought I maybe mentioned it and he'd taken care of it for me, and then forgotten to tell me. He's just that kind of guy."
"He'd better not be that kind of guy where people can see what he's doing nowadays," she said. "You can't do that stuff any more. People get angry. First thing you know, you're in disgrace."
"I know," Robey said, 'but that wasn't it. "Oh no," says Merrion,
"nothing like that. Professional courtesy's all. I know that stretch of road where Trooper Dacey busted you, and I know Dacey pretty well too. I don't like him. He's tucked it to me more'n once onna road. My tickets I hafta pay or he'll raise some kinda stink. But other people, he can't connect to me, their tickets're different matters. I don't think eighty's too fast where you were, when you were there, and therefore I didn't think Dacey should've grabbed you for doing it. So I dismissed it. "Substantial justice': that's our aim in this court."
"Naturally I thank him, but I'm also a little bit uncomfortable with all of this, so I say to him: "Well, I appreciate that. But you realize of course, it doesn't mean…"
"He cut me off. "Oh, calm down," he said, "for cryin' out loud. If I get a speeding ticket driving too fast onna federal reservation, I promise you I'll pay it. I wont call you up and say to you: "Hey, you gotta fix this for me. On account of I dumped one for you." This's between me and Dacey. It's a case of requited dislike. Every chance I get, I give him a shot. You're just an innocent bystander here. This isn't a serious matter."
"Year or so later I ran into him at a wedding. Bride's father's a honcho in the state Democratic party. He introduced us. Amby said the name was familiar, and I reminded him the reason. "I got a Dacey ticket, and you bagged it for me," I said. Offered to buy him a drink, which he accepted; said it'd probably get him indicted for taking a bribe for fixing tickets, but what the hell, he'd risk it. Joined us at our table. Got started telling stories and stayed for the rest of the day.
"Marie didn't like him; I did. Same with the other wives 'nd their husbands. Men liked him, women didn't. He used a lot of profanity, which I suppose was partly because we were all having lots to drink and everybody tends to cuss more when they're drinking. Marie and the other wives're dropping a few effs of their own every now and then, by the time we all called it a day, but… I don't know if you ever notice this, but women who hear every single cuss-word a man says, even if he says it under his breath, they never seem to be able to hear all the ones they use themselves."
"Can't say as I have," the judge said.
"Yeah," Robey said, 'well anyway, I've run into him a few times since then, conferences and so forth; had a few drinks and some meals. I enjoy his company. We're not buddies, never will be; age difference's too big. But I like him. I like his attitude toward the poor bastards who go through his court. He seems like he really does all he can to help them. No bleeding heart, I don't mean that, but he seems like a compassionate guy. Like he'd give you a break if he thought you deserved one and no one'd know it'd happened. He seems like he cares what happens to people, and if a rule has to get bent or some facts get overlooked so things turn out better for some poor bastard who made a mistake, but nobody really got hurt, well, I think he would bend the rule."
"The name's not familiar," she said. "Eric may've run into him, but I wouldn't know about that. He doesn't tell me anymore when he gets stopped. I give him too much grief. He's convinced his Range Rover's invisible; cops can't see it when it goes by at ninety. Pays all the tickets by mail. First I hear of it's when I 'get the insurance bill on my car and it's gone up again because he's a listed driver and he's gotten some more points. He says he likes to drive fast. If that's what it costs, so be it; he'll pay it. Says he doesn't want any redneck cop getting it into his head that his wife, the federal judge, fixes tickets for him."
"Probably a good idea," Robey said. "But anyway, that's who Amby is.
An all-right type of guy. Not a bad fella at all. Big, under six feet but fairly wide. White curly hair. Face's kind of red; he could lose a few pounds if he wanted, without doing himself any harm. He looks like what he is: he's a pol. He's been a pol all of his life. Been pals with Dan Hilliard since I don't know when; thirty years, probably more. Danny's the guy that got him appointed. From what Bissell feels he can let me in on, apparently Merrion's been repaying Danny for the favor ever since. Not paying him kickbacks, anything like that just giving him lots of nice presents."
"GratitudeV the judge said. "They're indicting people for gratitude now? Do they think it does some kind of damage or something? When did they make that against the law? Not that I ever saw much evidence of it actually taking place around these parts. Matter of fact, I wouldn't think there's ever been enough of it to warrant prosecution."
Robey laughed. "Yeah," he said, 'but apparently, what Bissell says, Amby's really grateful. This's the kind of appreciation that gives gratitude a bad name. What he did was he bought Hilliard a membership in the Grey Hills Country Club. Also bought himself one."
"The Chief belonged to that," she said. "He used to talk about it, now and then, when I first joined the firm. Pooler's father, too, I think;
Lee Pooler was a member, unless I'm mistaken. That's the high-rent district."
"That it is," Robey said. "And they're the type of people Grey Hills used to be for. Very exclusive. But then about, oh I don't know, twenty-five, thirty years ago, the club ran into some kind of a financial emergency. What you and I would call "strapped for cash."
Had to open up the membership and let some new blood in to fatten up the treasury. "New money" would've been more like it. Big rebuilding project or something. The very exclusive people like the Coreys and the Poolers couldn't see their way clear to footing the bill by their elegant selves, so the only alternative was to open the doors and let some of the better-heeled riffraff in.
"Most likely joining then didn't cost Merrion anywhere near what it'd cost today, if you could even get inI don't think they're accepting new members now. But still, as you say, it wasn't small change. And on top of that, since then apparently what he's been doing is paying the dues for both of them, too. That isn't petty cash either. Bissell thinks maybe three-four grand a year. I bet it's more like eight thousand apiece. Split the difference and call it, six grand a year.
Twenty years of that go by, it begins to mount up. Bissell thinks over a hundred and twenty thousand dollars by now, Merrion's paid in for his pal Danny. That's fairly serious money."
"Cowa'bunga," she said. "On the salary a clerk makes? You've got to be kidding. How on earth could he possibly do that? How much are we paying district court clerks these days?"
"It depends on where you're the clerk," Robey said. "The statute doesn't actually come right out and give any specific numbers. It's this very complicated formula that of course the legislators made just as hard to figure out as they possibly could when they wrote the salary statute. Sixty or seventy grand, I would say, by and large. Some of them probably get around eighty. And since Merrion's Hilliard's pal, and Hilliard used to have mucho clout, Merrion's probably one of those.
Say eighty thousand a year."
"Well, that's not too shabby," she said. "But still, I wouldn't think it was country-club country for him and a friend. Not Grey Hills level, at least."
"Well," Robey said. "Bissell sort of seems to think that what he gets for salary isn't all he makes, result of being clerk. Seems to think he's got some other source of income. I assume it isn't bribes if it was, Bissell'd have him keeping his room tidy at Club Fed by now, down in Allentown PA. But what it could be I can't imagine. He didn't come from big money. His father was a car salesman up at Valley Ford in Holyoke. Nice guy. Everyone liked him, but he wasn't rich and he died young. His mother worked in a bakery. I don't think he's moonlighting at anything, either.
"Still, his overhead's always been low. He's never been married, so he's never been divorced. If he's had any children he's had to support and send to school, no one seems to know about it. His mother's in a nursing home; I assume she's on Medicare. I assume he supports her, whatever else she needs. When she had to go into the home, he sold his condo up at Hampton Pond and moved back to the house he grew up in. So really, I don't know how he could afford Grey Hills either, when he first did it or now. It's a mystery to me."
"Maybe he's teaching law," the judge said. "Nights or something? At Western New England."
"I don't think he's a lawyer," Robey said. "He may be, but I don't think he is. If he had've been, I don't think he'd be doing what he is now, being a district court clerk. I think Hilliard would've gotten him a judgeship."
"Yeah," she said, nodding, 'he probably would've at that. Well, I don't know Danny all that well, but what I know I've always liked. And now this pretty picture starts to unfold before us. I wont say I can hardly wait."
"I can't say I'm looking forward to it much myself," Robey said. "My mother's father opened the Armstrong Tile store over in West Springfield after World War Two. Bigelow Carpet line was later. My father ran the business after Grumpy died, 'til it was his turn to retire. Your family's been living in an area, really not that large a one, doing business fifty years, going into people's homes, time and time again; whenever something like this happens you're bound to know some of the people affected by it. Not that they're friends of yours, exactly; they're just people you've been on good terms with, part of the landscape, the same social fabric. Hate to see them fall and get disgraced, get their lives destroyed like that, torn apart in public.
In a way it's happening to you."
"Although not saying that I think, for one instant, mind you," the judge said, 'that Dan Hilliard never did anything wrong. Something most other people probably also would've done, but still very much against the law? Sure, of course he did. He had balls. He would've done lots of slightly illegal things; shady, questionable things.
Probably hundreds of them, over the course of the years."
She paused and then chuckled. "Like everybody else in his line of work back then, when he was still in it. It was the custom and usage of the trade, the good old political trade. No one ever got too badly hurt."
She reflected. "Come right down to it," she said, "I guess what I'm really saying is that I don't want to see the guy caught. Must be about sixty by now; a small living legend around here by now so I would think, anyway. Living legends should be more careful. Stay out of these little schemes and scrapes they always seem to be getting into, and then getting hurt by. Avoid doing things that'll wreck their careers, if they get caught doing them. And if they can't manage to do that for themselves, then we should look out for them, as though they were endangered species. Can't have our legends becoming extinct."
She hesitated. "Like you say, it's funny how it hits you. Almost like you were somehow involved in whatever they had going on up there in Canterbury, and now what's happening to them is also happening to you."
"Yeah," Robey said, 'but Cohen still wants his hearing, so I've got to call him and tell him: When do I tell him to come in?"
She sighed. "Ahhh," she said, 'tomorrow, I guess. Tomorrow afternoon.
Quarter of two. And this one we'll do here, in chambers. If the US Attorney wants to showboat this thing now, making public speeches and calling for Dan's head, first let him get an indictment."
Two.
From the very beginning Janet LeClerc, then twenty-nine, had felt threatened by Merrion. "The guy," she would say abruptly to the impersonally cheerful cashier at Dineen's Convenient where she bought her cigarettes and coffee, '1 forget his name. You know him, the one I mean; big white-haired guy down there, the courthouse; not the judge, the other one." This happened Friday mornings following the third Thursday afternoons when Corinne (pronounced "Kreen' by her fellow workers), 'the switchboard woman' called to remind Janet soothingly that she must report on Saturday for her monthly conference. "Because we know that sometimes, you, well, sometimes people who're scheduled to report, forget. These things. Everybody does they're not part of their routine."
"I don't know what he wants me to say. And I need to do that, don't I, say what he wants me to say he could have me put in jail." Therefore every time she had to see him she told him she did her best 'to have a regular routine, you know. That's what I do." Because from what Corinne said to her, that seemed to be what they wanted. But because it never seemed to satisfy him" It like he don't believe me or he doesn't want to listen' she felt anxious each time as she did it, wanting him to believe her. Then afterwards she wasn't sure she remembered doing it.
So at their eleventh conference in the clerk-magistrate's office of the saddeningly rundown Canterbury District Courthouse, on the morning of the third Saturday in August, she once more earnestly described to Merrion her trust in routine as a pathway to the virtuous life she believed he wanted her to lead. "I think that's how I can do, you know, like you said for me to do: to see if I can just stay out of trouble. For a year. So that other thing I did there, you can make it disappear. You know: like you said you would."
The courthouse, closed on Saturday, was quiet. "Not so much distraction," Merrion explained to Hilliard. "Man can actually hear himself think in there if he wants to, on a Saturday. Not so many fuckin' people always callin' you, the phone, bumpin' into you and stoppin' you, asking' things and sayin' things, getting' in your way.
"S why whenever me and Lennie decide we're gonna take on another one our projects stay outta trouble a year and we drop the charges on 'em I always see them Saturdays, when there's a chance I can think straight."
Mornings Mondays through Fridays the beige rubber-tiled corridors and stairwells, eight feet wide, were fetidly overcrowded. The ventilation system became overloaded by nine' fifteen each day. Too little air rebreathed too often by too many nervous, sweating people became warm and moist.
Describing his work-day environment at the shag end of a winter day to Hilliard in the dark-panelled grill room of the clubhouse at Grey Hills, the room lightly touched with the aroma of maple logs burning on the hearth, Merrion said: "When I first got into it, over Chicopee, I wasn't ready for it. Mobs of people, day after day, smelling like meat that went bad. When I was doing the substitute teaching; when I was with you and we're out campaigning, meetings and rallies, conventions and so forth: there were people around us, and they weren't all always our friends; sometimes they hated our guts. But at least you could go toe-to-toe with 'em, stand there and fight with the bastards, th out turnin' your stomach and suddenly thinkin': "Jesus, I'm gonna throw up."
He stared morosely through the mullioned bay window at the orchard of fruit trees bare and black in snow behind the clubhouse at the base of Mount Wolf, the remaining blue light darkening into violet and black in the late afternoon. The maple wood snapped in the fire and the bartender made the bottles clink as he removed and replaced them one by one on the shelves, wiping dust from their collars and shoulders.
"Most of the people who come to the courthouse 'cause they're in trouble: The way they stink, they deserve it. You should get in trouble for smelling like they do. They don't wash themselves or brush their teeth or even use some mouthwash. They don't change their underwear and socks, or their other clothes either. And lots of times you'd swear the person that you're talking to's never figured out why the stalls in public toilets always seem to have those rolls of paper in them. So as a result they look dirty and they stink. Their breath's foul, and it seems like there's armies of the bastards. Day after day after day they keep comin', an ill wind that blows through the world."
"When we talk about democracy," Hilliard replied, 'they're who we mean.
They're exercising the fifth freedom. Freedom of speech; freedom to worship; freedom from want; freedom from fear; freedom to smell like a wet bear."
On the weekdays, worried-looking men between twenty-five and sixty, some heavily muscled, as many of them white as black or Hispanic, struggled front ally through the crowds of young people, using their shoulders and observably restraining strong impulses to shove others out of their way. They wore rumpled dusty suits that did not fit, under stained tan and gray raincoats with crumpled, button-tab collars that stood away from their necks at odd angles. Or they wore baseball caps and windbreakers or nylon parkas, open on plaid flannel shirts; plain tee-shirts; tee-shirts with messages extolling naked coed sports; chino pants or jeans or corduroys or warm-up pants; scuffed loafers broken-down at the counters, steel-toed yellowish-tan construction boots or heavily soiled white training shoes. They carried cardboard containers of coffee and folded newspapers, and if they were not on the way to report to Probation Intake, the room with the big gold-lettered brown sign on the right as they came in, they asked people in uniforms or men and women in civilian clothes who seemed to be at home in the surroundings how to find Room 7, 8 or 11.
Three assistant clerk-magistrates, two men and a woman, presided in those airless eight-by-twelve-foot rooms as though they had been built-in, permanent fixtures installed along with the electrical wiring and the brown vinyl mop boards during construction of the pitted ivory-painted cinder-block walls. The first assistant, Robert Cooke, nephew of the late Most Rev. Edmund Mackintosh, auxiliary bishop of the Roman Catholic diocese of Springfield, was a thin, dour white man in his early fifties who became hostile when he knew or suspected that the person talking to him favored legal access to abortion. His wife, Mimi, had at last convinced him after many years first not to start conversations on the subject, and second not to try to attempt subtly to ascertain how others viewed the matter, because when they differed with him he became either sullen or scornful, depending on whether he considered them his superiors or inferiors. "And it hurts you, Bob, it really does. It hurts you at the courthouse and it's why almost no one wants to see us or be friends with us except people who agree with you, and so when we go out that's all we ever talk about, and that's no fun at all."
Tyrone Thomas was the third assistant clerk, an amiable black man in his early thirties who wanted no trouble and tried to make none. In his teens he had become the protege of a basketball coach at Cambridge Rindge amp; Latin School in Cambridge who'd gone on to a second career as a state senator. Thomas avoided prejudice by ignoring it if possible and by avoiding aggressive individuals who made ignorance impossible.
People who knew him and his wife, Carol, a tall and beautiful light-skinned black woman who worked as a field-audit supervisor for the Internal Revenue Service, believed he had married well above his station and wondered what she saw in him. He tried not to share that puzzlement and pretended not to notice or be hurt when he sensed it unexpressed or inferred it when implied.
The second assistant was a somewhat-overweight thirty-eight-year-old white woman, Jeanne Flagg. Her father, Archie Oakschott, after eighteen years on the bench had taken senior status as a judge of the Norfolk County Probate Court in Dedham, near Westwood where she had grown up. She continued to wear the cotton and wool, light blue, light grey and light green suits she had purchased when she had gotten the job four years before she became accustomed to the court-house-ritual morning coffee breaks with pastry in the snack bar. No longer somewhat underweight, she was therefore uncomfortable in her clothes, moving carefully and slowly, aware that each change of position tested the seams to the limits.
The assistant clerk-magistrates had to decide whether there were sufficient grounds to recommend to the judge that orders should be issued under Chapter 209A, Massachusetts General Laws, restraining the men who came before them from getting near enough to the people whom they had claimed to love, in order to harm them again. Usually the victims were their wives or girlfriends, but sometimes the men had beaten their children, or hurt their defenseless parents (men accused of sexually molesting children were processed differently). The assistant clerks grimly tried with squinting eyes to see things that could not be seen, hoping to reduce by means of narrow wariness the unreliability of the guesses that they made about whether the particular man under scrutiny was likely to lay rough hands in most instances, again on his female sexual partner; whether he would benefit from still another chance either to control his use of beverage alcohol or quit taking the illegal drugs that he thought licensed him to commit violence. Or whether instead he would soon steal away back into his addictions like a furtive animal skulking back to its kill to feed the rage that made him use his hands on her -and might some day if continued come to involve a gun or knife or club.
Each of the visitors knew what would happen to him if the clerk-magistrate decided that he was either unable or lying to conceal his refusal to stop hitting the woman who had angered him by attempting to influence some aspect of his behavior by means other than prompt oral, vaginal or anal attention to his sexual requirements. He would have to go before a judge who would reason that he must be put in jail.
Otherwise the judge would think himself at risk that the man who this time had beaten the living shit out of the woman he considered his chattel would kill her the next time he got riled up. If he did that then the judge would get reamed out on TV and in the papers. The men knew: that judges did not feature getting reamed out; that they themselves did not want to go to jail; and that the clerk-magistrates could seldom be appeased more than once by signs of contrition and remorse. But they also knew that if they were placed under orders restraining them from having anything to do with their scared women, or put in jail for having violated such an order, the next chance they got to get drunk or stoned each of them would know first who was to blame for putting him into this desperate, humiliating, probably hopeless, situation: the woman who had either called the cops or made enough noise while he'd been hitting her so that a neighbor had called them.
And that secondly in that red anger each of them would know uncontrollably that she must be punished for it, more severely than before, so that she would not do it again, not ever. And each of them also would know already and exactly what form the punishment must take.
This gave them a dim sense of inexorably advancing doom that threatened them with despair so bleak their minds cried out for a drink or a dime bag that would make it go away.
So the men who had hit their women, filled with resentment as they were, did not try at all to hide the fact that they felt troubled and dejected and very often severely hungover, as well. Trying to conceal the resentment, they exerted themselves to appear even sadder and more miserable than they felt, forcing themselves to grovel abjectly thus making themselves feel even worse.
The clerk-magistrates and the other people who worked in the courthouse were well aware of this tactic and its practice, and the vengeful feelings it was meant, but failed, to conceal, so they treated the batterers differently from other defendants, discounting their displays of woe, sadness, regret and remorse by sixty to seventy percent. This made it difficult for the personnel to conduct themselves in their customary courteous professional manner, dealing with the men who had hit women. The only way they could do it was by acting as though they didn't know why it was the men had come before them. This was harder for the women workers in the courthouse than it was for the men, because they had to hide fear as well as anger and contempt for the defendants. The men who had hit women found the pretense unconvincing and knew very well that the courthouse people did know that was what they had done, and scorned and despised them for doing it. The men tended to be fairly quiet, but still visibly resentful of this additional injustice they perceived against them.
Most of the time most of the people who worked in the courthouse tried to seem sympathetic and be polite to everyone who was there because they had gotten in some kind of trouble. The defendants often found their professional solicitude condescending, and sneered at it to demonstrate contempt, but in that, too, they were mistaken; it was not feigned. The personnel felt real empathy with hard-working men and women who had never been in court until the morning after the night they had had too much to drink and had gotten stopped driving home at two in the morning, doing fifteen miles an hour in the middle of the road, steering by the yellow lines, had blown.18 on the Breathalyzer, ten points over the legal state of drunkenness, and had fallen down when ordered to stand on one foot. "There but for the grace of God' was a phrase they often murmured as the Driving-Unders begged futilely to retain their licenses in disregard of punitive statutes mandating revocation. When they were convinced that an injured defendant, accused of resisting arrest, had in fact been unsuccessfully attempting to defend himself against a police officer gone out of control, they saw to it that the judge handling the case became aware of the relevant facts, even if no evidence of them was offered in open court. They also often felt real pity for aimless early teenagers from dysfunctional homes whose undifferentiated fear and pent-up hostility enabled them to commit their first serious criminal offenses on the apparent basis of mere evil impulse (new personnel speedily acquired and inexpertly used the diagnostic jargon of psychology as a handy means of mental self-defense, reflexively learning early that they needed it to explain behavior they would otherwise find frighteningly incomprehensible).
The majority of the young people crowding the stairwells and the hallways were repeat offenders, but experience did not enable them to foresee whether they would have to go into the courtroom, perhaps emerging from it with their wrists in manacles. They had been ordered to report for interviews with other courthouse personnel, either adult probation officers or Department of Youth Services caseworkers. Until the public address system raspily summoned them by name to report to Rooms 17, 18, 18A or 20, they beached themselves in the halls and clustered in the stairwells, obstructing the passageways. Some were morosely silent, but most talked, elliptically, ceaselessly asking each other for predictions that none of them could make, repeating questions none of them could answer, now and then casting wild glances outside the groups of people whom they knew, wishing to discover somewhere in the hallways someone their age who looked just like them and who therefore could be trusted but knew the answers to their questions; could tell them what was going to happen to them when the judge went on the bench.
Even those who had been most boisterously demonstrative in the corridors spoke cryptically and softly, never assertively, once alone in those conferences. Averting their eyes from the persons pressing questions on them, they shook their heads a lot, shrugging their shoulders and rolling their eyes; saying "Myunoh' for "Mmm, I don't know' to indicate they lacked sufficient information to say where they had gotten the narcotics or the stolen property the police had found on them, or when they were asked to account for the whereabouts of some fugitive habitual associate or the gunshot wound of some hostile competitor.
If the person talking to them was a probation officer they evaded answering because they believed their only hope of deliverance from jail lay in preservation of the officer's considerable ignorance of what they had been up to. The hazard for those under questioning by DYS caseworkers was similar: removal from the street and commitment to DYS custody. So they too were uncommunicative. The probation and DYS officers knew this and it frustrated them. When the recalcitrance of their clients prevented them from deciding with assurance whether the young person could be safely left at liberty or should be locked up usually, again their annoyance at being thwarted and the same perception of risk that made judges uneasy about letting batterers go free prejudiced the officers in favor of commitment.
Young offenders conferring with counsel appointed to defend them, mistrusting their free lawyers' willingness, ability and intention to do a good job for them, accordingly felt entirely free to mislead them or lie to them, as suited their moods. Knowing this, and having a great many cases, the Mass. Defenders therefore tried to ascertain as efficiently as possible whether this client like virtually all their others was unable or refusing to assist in his own defense, and therefore must be pleaded-out to the best deal the defender could get.
The defenders customarily did not ask their clients to say whether they were innocent; attorneys and clients alike proceeded on the tacit understanding that the defendant in question, no matter how many times he might ritually, vehemently deny it, had in fact committed the offense alleged against him.
Most of the clients were black or Hispanic, either undersized, short and gaunt, or broad and grossly overweight, but of average height. The frowning or tearful brusied young mothers with pacifier-sucking infants in their arms or small children riding on their vast hips seldom seemed to be comforted by what went on in the courthouse, but the young males in unguarded moments often appeared at least cheerful, if not actually happy, at ease, hanging out among friends in familiar, shabby surroundings.
From time to time this insouciance bothered the judge. "It's almost as though this's their real goddamn home," Judge Leonard Cavanaugh mused one day to Merrion at the bench, having gavel led the courtroom quiet for the fourth time that morning. He was almost keening, cupping his left hand over the microphone that rose up on the flexible gooseneck to capture what he said for the recorder that preserved everything it was allowed to hear in the courtroom.
Later in the judge's chambers, Merrion demurred. "More like their real school," he said, 'not so much their real home. When we were about the same age as these little maggots are now, we weren't doing drugs and ambushing other kids we didn't like. We were driving teachers nuts; we were driving our parents nuts. The principals of our schools called us "You-again." But we were not bugging the cops all the time, and the people who worked in the courthouses then never laid their eyes on us.
Most of us didn't know where it was."
"Yeah, well, it's not that way any more," Cavanaugh said. "It's not as though it's someplace they should never have to come; their parents're gonna kill 'em when they get home. They're not afraid or embarrassed. This's normal for them, just an ordinary thing; that's what's so frightening. Get collared selling drugs or breaking in or stealing cars; get yourself arrested; this's where you come. Routine.
Just another stop on their regular routes, another place where they go.
They actually live part of their lives here. Where they validate them, really authenticate their existences. It's really frightening."
The young people expanded, seeming somehow to take up more room than had been enclosed by the roof, cellar hole and exterior walls of the courthouse. On weekdays especially Mondays, when the mornings yielded up the weekends' ripe harvests of police operations in Hampton Pond, Hampton Falls and Cumberland, the other towns within the Canterbury jurisdiction they sat and stood along the walls, sat and crouched upon the stairs, hunkered in the corners and bunched up on all the maple benches. Endlessly but slowly they went into and came out of the elevator that plied up and down between the basement and the first and second floors, distributing them among the corridors leading to the offices and conference rooms and courtrooms; never coming to rest even when standing still or seated and admonished to be silent in one of the three trial sessions. As they moved about they had much to say to one another about the inexhaustible variety of things to do in the great tempting, yielding, wide world outside; before, after, during or instead of, days and weeks and months and years spent or to be spent in the other spacious world inside, in jail, together or with absent friends or strangers. They had so much to talk about that they never seemed to finish saying it, and so were never quiet. They held endless discussions at their normal outdoor-hailing conversational volumes that accumulated, reverberating and combining to make a ceaseless, unintelligible, unrelenting din like the noise of an assembly line building heavy machinery; noise that broke like surf against the walls and surged along the floors, echoing against the ceilings of the corridors and stairwells and restrooms, booming, wearing and abrading and eroding the tender surface of the mind and nerves.
Most of the young people left the courthouse each day before noon. Those not led away tearfully or broodingly in handcuffs trooped out the side door (the ceremonially wide front doors at the top of the broad crumbling concrete steps Barrows Construction having used too much sand in the mix, sand being cheaper than calcined clay and limestone being locked and blocked for reasons of security), shuckin' and jivin'; genially menacing; waiting for the twilight and the dark to come; untied black and white high-top basketball, cross-training and workout shoes flapping, a hundred, two hundred dollars a pair; oversized black pants billowing, unfastened and un zippered black sweatshirts and hooded jackets sliding off their shoulders, jostling and shoving one another as they passed the metal-detector archway that had screened their entrances.
But noon was too late to soothe Merrion's mind; by the end of each morning it had become raw and inflamed, so that by the middle of any weekday while he would have been willing to concede that calm reflection and assessment might once more be possible, he would be in no mood to attempt it. Once during his ninth or tenth year on the job, by then as first assistant, Richie Hammond had said to him after a brutal day: This's an awful job, you know, a really awful job." And he had said to Richie, slowly and distinctly, meaning every single word:
"There are days when this can be the worst fucking job in the world."
It had passed into standard usage in the Canterbury courthouse. "Okay, altogether now, kids: what kind of job is it today?" "The worst fuckin' job in the world." And then everybody would laugh, and think to themselves that this laugh in defiance of the fact that there was absolutely nothing to laugh about would be what would get them all through the day on the job.
Except when he was being truthful, as he did not often allow himself to be once or twice with Cavanaugh, who looked incredulous, suspicious that Merrion was putting him on; several times with Hilliard after a good round of golf, a dinner and some drinks Merrion always led that cheer and acted convincingly as though he believed it. But on those other occasions he said: "But I guess in fact I don't, really, believe that. As silly as I know this sounds, Dan, except maybe to you, there have been times in that courthouse when I think I may've done someone some good.
I'm not saying now I think I've saved people. Nobody saves other people. Only idiots think they can do that; only bleeding-heart assholes'd even try. But maybe I've managed to actually grab some poor kid or some poor strugglin' bastard and help him pull himself up out of the mud. Give him a break, maybe first one he's had, see if he gets just that one break, maybe he can save himself.
"More'n a few of 'em have, Danny-boy, and that as you say, 's a true fact. Some nights I get reckless, I can't get to sleep, I got too many things on my mind, something I'm worried about. And then when that happens, that's when I start thinking: "Hey, why can't I sleep? What the hell am I worried about? If I wake up tomorrow and I find out I'm dead, I did some good things, I was here. I figure I rescued a person a year, each year I been on the job; that's over eighteen people by now, otherwise might've ruined their lives. Not that these've been real dramatic cases; not saying that at all. Just saying that some fairly ordinary people that you've never even heard of managed to get themselves straightened out, so they've had quiet, ordinary, maybe even fairly happy, lives. Instead of the exciting kind you would've heard about if they hadn't turned themselves around, because they would've been in big trouble. They would've been making headlines.
"And that's what I've always figured's really been the kind of thing that down on the ground is what the two of us've been doing all these years in politics. What we've always thought the whole thing has been about, getting you elected, getting me into my job. Making it so that when something good needed doing down in Boston, or in the courthouse out here, there'd be someone there who would see the need and make sure it got done. And so that's what I think I can say I have done. So I usually sleep pretty good."
Merrion required quiet to encourage contemplation and reflection. Then he could enjoy intellection, and think he did it well. Silently reveling therefore in the Saturday luxury of it, he pondered what Janet had said about routine. As he had on several previous occasions, he once again concluded he completely believed her, and knew her to be sincere.
Nevertheless, Merrion was not encouraged. He did not share Janet's confidence in routine as a safeguard of virtue, and he knew dolefully that Janet's best effort to do anything was unlikely to be very good.
He gazed steadily at her but did not make any comment.
The quiet did not soothe Janet LeClerc as it comforted Merrion. So to fill it she told him again that she had devised her routine on the basis of deductions that she made from her observations that many of the other residents of the eighteen-unit building where she lived appeared to have routines. "Not that I'm minding their business," she said, 'or anything like that. I wouldn't do nothing like that. But you know how it is: When you're around all day long, you see things.
Can't help it."
She said that from what she had seen, most of them were single, as she was. She presented her data earnestly, as though she had been commissioned to carry out a poll producing the results. Merrion thought: Survey figures released today show that fifty-nine percent of those living in the same building with]anet have daily routines. The remainder said either that they have no opinion or else they don't give a shit. That was television; it had taught her that if she noticed something in her idleness it meant something data must mean something; the mass had been collected, hadn't it? People wouldn't go to all the trouble of finding out all of this stuff and then putting it on TV if it wasn't important. Janet believed in TV. All the TV that she watched, day after day, when she'd had nothing to do: she didn't like many of the things she saw and heard on it, but TV itself as pure will and idea enjoyed her full and complete confidence.
"Sort of between marriages. It seems like they've probably been married, most of them, one time or another. They're all really that young, you know? Like most of the people are who've never been married, usually are. Just looking around, for somebody else, somebody else to be with. They're exactly like me, marking time. Except they've already all got their routines, the same ones they had back when they were married. It's not like they got divorced from their jobs, when they got divorced from their wives. Or their husbands, either. They just used to be married in the morning, when they went to work, but now they aren't that anymore."
Janet had never been married. Merrion knew she wanted very much to be married, or at least to get married, so that then, if it didn't work out, then at least she would have been married. "Because that way it would be better. It would seem more like normal, you know? Like everything was normal. Because lots of people've been married, and then they got divorced, and so people understand that. So they're used to that, and they don't think it's so strange."
She had told him all about it the second or third time he'd called her in for a conference, back when they were first getting acquainted back around the turn of the century, it seemed like, when he was still only just beginning to find out she was another one, still able to resist the unpleasant discovery that he'd gone and done it again, let himself in for it once more, in the early autumn of 1994. "Always been a big ambition of mine, to get married," she'd told him, looking down at the ring finger embarrassingly naked on her left hand in her lap, twisting the skin of the knuckle with her right thumb and first two fingers. "I think most people do, expect it'll happen, think they'll get married some day. It wasn't the only thing that I thought I'd like to do, but it was the big one."
He reported that conversation to Louella Daggett in the regional office of the Commonwealth's Department of Social Services. Daggett was a short stocky black woman in her early sixties. She had arthritis in her knees that made it very difficult for her to get around. She cited it to justify her irritable disposition, but Merrion had known her years before she'd ever mentioned arthritis and she'd always had a lousy disposition. Merrion thought it was probably attributable to the kind of people and problems she encountered in her work. But believing that frustration made her irascible did not impel him to tolerate her surliness; their discussions about individuals whose behavior had attracted the attention of the court as well as DSS tended to be acrimonious.
Louella had been Janet's caseworker since she had gone on welfare in 1986. She said 'when Janet first came on the reason that she gave us was that she'd had a husband and he'd left her, run away. We took it at face-value, we always do, their stories, but we also check them out.
We couldn't find no husband. There'd never been one. The husband who'd left her, "Wayne" she said his name was: he'd never existed.
"Harvey," we called him, "Harvey, the bastard." She was apparently the only living person who'd ever been able to see him. No one else ever had. Deserted by a phantom husband; can you beat it? Wish-fulfillment, but a lousy job of it. Here she'd gone and dreamed the guy up, gone to all that trouble, and then he turns out to be no good. You'd think if you made up your own husband, well, he might not be a good provider but at least you'd think he'd be a fairly faithful companion, at least around when you needed him. Not Janet's make-believe husband. Janet couldn't lay sod right-side up.
"Completely serious about it, though. Couldn't talk her out of it.
Claimed she'd actually been married not divorced, just married and the only reason that she had to be on welfare was that her no-good husband'd run off someplace no one could find him and make him pay support. Fact there was no marriage license in the records in Springfield didn't faze her a bit; maybe it was Chicopee, or maybe Holyoke. Couldn't find a record of her marriage there, either. We checked with the State House, Secretary, State. No record there. We told her that.
"Didn't miss a beat. "Then it must've been somewhere else. Maybe we went to Vermont and got married. My memory's never been good. It was all quite a few years ago." Could not talk her out of it, no matter how you tried.
"This went on for two or three years. Then after a while she stopped remembering him. Harvey went off the screen, disappeared without leaving a trace. My guess is she thought she had to be a deserted wife in order to get a check and then someone convinced her she didn't. Or maybe she just finally forgot it. She's not all there, you know, poor thing. In addition to never having been what you'd call extremely bright, she does not have all her marbles."
He could remember how Janet had looked when she had first talked about marriage. She had shaken her head, making the dark tendrils of the dull, dark-brown pageboy-haircut she was wearing then flick around her ears and the corners of her eyes. Daggett snickered at Merrion when he'd suggested that maybe she could persuade Janet to 'get herself cleaned up some, you know? Do something with herself? Wash her goddamned greasy hair, for starters. No one's going to hire her back, only thing she knows how to do, wipe tables up in restaurants, clean up the cafeteria in some hospital or school, if we send her up and she comes in looking like she does now, needs a wiping-down herself."
"You're still sort of new at this, aren't you," Louella'd said to him.
"Been at it now, what, only twenny, thirty years? And you still haven't quite got the hang of it. You courthouse guys, you make me laugh. You're all alike. You're all so cut-and-dried. You all think it's all so simple. All you political types. You trip over one of these people like Janet and you think the reason she's miserable's because no one else ever noticed her before, took a hand in her life.
If you'd run into her six months or ten years ago you'd've gotten her all straightened out long before this -but never mind; you'll take care of it now.
"Nuts. You know why it says in the Bible that we'll always have the poor with us? Because it's true: we always have and we always will.
You court guys don't seem to know this. You've all been spoiled rotten, is what. "Do this. Do that. Do it right now," is what you tell them. "That'll fix it." And then, of course, they do it, and it happens. It gets fixed. Until you turn around and they see you're not looking their direction anymore. Then it gets unfixed again, just like it was before.
"You guys got jail to offer. That's how come what you say goes. A person don't do what you tell him? His ass goes to jail. A person don't do what I tell her? Well, what'm I gonna do? Cut her money off?
Sure, take her check away. And then you know what happens next? I'll tell you what happens, aw'toh-mat-tick-lee. Her ass goes right out on the street, because that's where she takes it, for sale for twenty dollars. And when she offers, suck off an undercover cop, and gets herself arrested, she tells the first judge she sees how it's all my fault. I cut her welfare off. What's a poor girl supposed to do? Is she supposed to starve7. And when that shit makes the papers, boy, and gets on the TV, guess whose ass goes on the line. M31 ass goes in the deli sheer. J come out cold cuts.
"Now your Janet project, all right? I know you got a good heart, Amby, probably a generous one. But that don't make you smart. You just lemme tell you something, here, what you're up against. I told that girl, two hundred times, to get her self shaped up. And she tells me, two hundred times, she'll get to it right off. She will surely get to that. And the next time that I see her, what is it I see? Same old thing I saw before, looks just like she always did. Like she got left out in the rain all night or something'. Hell, not all night all year.
You haven't got a project here; you got a career."
"And I don't see why I can't do it, do this thing." Janet in the August morning was talking again about marriage. "People do it every day. In the paper all the time, I used to see it there, when I got the Sunday paper. All these people, getting married. So then, why can't I? Look at my mother. Jesus, look what she did, what my damned mother did to me. Went off and left me by myself? Nobody to fall back on?
All by myself in this thing. But that didn't stop her. No, not at all. She could still get married, damn her. Sure, she could get married, if she wanted to. And she was no good at all. Well, so, I don't see why then I can't."
Merrion could not respond without giving her some kind of reaction, but he did not want to lie to her or tell her what he thought. He knew from years of dealing with people like Janet how important hope was to the hopeless. His experience came mostly from dealing with hapless men, usually between twenty-five and forty-five; generally still hungover, unshaven and dirty after still another night in the familiar surroundings of the holding tank. Disgusted cops wearing rubber gloves had thrown them in there bodily after they had pissed in the street in broad daylight, again: yelled something obscene at a cop, again; vomited on a display-window, again; slid their filthy hands under the sneeze-baffle to rummage in the lettuce-tray in the McDonald's salad-bar, again; or insulted some woman, again.
They weren't going to be improved much by the fresh thirty days in jail they now had to serve, again. He knew it and they knew it. But tradition nullified knowledge and established that they still must be exhorted, assured with ardent forcefulness that they must and therefore would emerge reformed. Almost all of them were traditionalists too, made so by repetition of the ritual. Just as drearily convinced by much experience as their exhorters were that miraculous transformation wasn't going to happen this time either, once again they summoned up the strength to reject the certainty, once more trying very hard to believe what they knew to be untrue.
The few who didn't make the effort were the ones who no longer gave a shit. In a way their resignation was a farewell present to Merrion, a kind of dreadful peace; once he could see that one of his regulars had given up hope entirely, he knew he was not going to have the sad duty of seeing him many more times. He resettled himself in his excellent chair and reminded himself that whatever the merits of the matter might be, he was still smarter than Janet. He did not say anything.
Satisfied by his silence that if she'd been in danger, she'd escaped from it, Janet veered back to the subject of routine. "They live mostly by themselves, most of the time, you know? Like sometimes they might have someone stay over, a Friday night or for the weekend, or something. Sometimes for longer. But they live by themselves most of the time."
She stopped again, craftily, and waited, to see if he would speak. She was still waiting, but now not very confidently, for Merrion to say something that would give her an idea about why he had asked her to come to his office in the courthouse at 9:15 on a Saturday in August, when she would have assumed it would be closed. When he didn't she talked some more, to fill up the dead air. When she was alone, she prepared for such occasions by talking to herself. Wherever she might be on her way to the store every day; out taking a walk; sitting on a bench in the park; exploring the supermarket again Janet talked to herself, a low, unceasing mutter people did look at her funny sometimes, the bastards, but she tried to pay no attention to them.
When she was by herself there were none of those official silences she really didn't like. She was nicer than most of the people who had called her in over the years: when she asked a question, she was polite enough to acknowledge it, at least with a shrug.
Merrion gazed at Janet and wondered idly where the two of them fitted among the planets and the stars onto the infinite curve of the universe, and why it had become necessary that from time to time they occupy adjoining places.
"My front window," Janet said. "You just can't help it, noticing things, you've got a window like that." Her third-floor unit, number 14, sitting atop number 7 on the second floor, number 1 on the first one bedroom, bathtub with shower, small kitchen, living-room dining-room combo had a picture window over-looking Eisenhower Boulevard. "Sixteen-ninety-two Eisenhower Boulevard."
She said it somewhat ruefully but defiantly, too, almost proudly, as though aware that the address conveyed a kind of raffish distinction Merrion would recognize. "You must know something about where I live.
You got me in there, didn't you? Right? I've got that part right, haven't I?"
She had it right. "I got you in there," he said. "I called the super for you, what, almost a year ago now. Lucky for you, that one unit was open and the guy owed me a favor, something I did for his kid."
That was all true. Merrion had sidetracked Steve Brody's damned kid safely away from a crack-cocaine prosecution into a private, long-term, residential drug-rehab program run under a state contract in Stowe, thus sparing the kid a criminal record (for the time being, anyway, Merrion'd thought, not expecting much more than that) and opening up the apartment where Mark'd been living with a girlfriend as useless as he was. But it wasn't all of the truth. Among the many other things Merrion knew about that building was the fact that the Town of Canterbury on the last business day of every month by check drawn on the Canterbury Trust Co. disbursed $385 in public funds payable to Valley Better Residences, co Canterbury Trust Co." Canterbury, Massachusetts, in full payment for the coming month's rental of that apartment to Janet LeClerc (until the town had changed over to direct deposit of payments to vendors via electronic transfer, the cancelled checks were returned to the town every month stamped on the back by the bank 'credit to account of Fourmen's Realty Trust Valley Better Residences').
Merrion's familiarity with the location went back almost a quarter of the century. The building was still new when he first visited it late in 1970, completed earlier that year. F.D. Barrows Construction, the same low-bidding jerry-builders that had constructed the new district courthouse thirteen years before, had put it up. The low-grade bricks were un weathered The cheap mortar of the pointing was neat, regular and even. The newness concealed the shabbiness for a while, but Merrion, cursorily inspecting it as he went in and out of it, once or twice a week three or four times if Larry had been having a bad stretch -week after week, looked on as the weather wore the mask off.
Larry had gone to the cheap brand-new place to die. The whole world itselfd been pretty new then, as far as Merrion'd been concerned. He contemplated it and he saw that it was good. It looked to have been much better built than 1692 Ike, and at the age of thirty he had reason to believe he was soon going to have it on a string.
Merrion visited Lane the first time on Saturday, the day after Christmas, bringing a holiday fifth of Old Granddad. It was one of three Christmas bottles from lawyers allocated to each of the three assistants by Richie Hammond. He reserved both big baskets of fruit from abstemious attorneys balancing their strong beliefs in temperance against their disinclination to lose their ready access to continuances of cases for which clients had not paid and forgiveness for late filings and the other nine jugs for himself. Protesting the injustice to Hammond by reminding him that Lane had split the take evenly, Merrion had learned by chance that Larry was living alone. "Yeah,"
Hammond said with satisfaction, locking up the office at 2:00 P.M. on Christmas Eve and collecting the last of his gift parcels from the oak bench beside the door. "Thought being generous one day a year'd make people forget what a bastard he was all the rest of it. And what did it get him? Not much. Now he's up there by himself on the boulevard, all by his lonesome, gone and forgotten as well."
"What the hell're you talking about?" Merrion said. "Larry's got a big family, six or eight kids. He lives with his wife down in Indian Orchard in the same little house they raised all those kids in. "One bathroom and ten people trying to get in it."
"Well, his family got wise to him," Hammond said gaily. "Told him either he hadda lay off a the grog, or go live by himself somewhere else. Serves the prick right, you ask me."
Merrion had felt sharply embarrassed not to have found out earlier. He had not made any effort to contact Lane in the month that had passed since Larry, having no choice in the face of Carries family power, had turned the chief clerk's job over to Richie, going on what was called terminal leave the week after the four-day Thanksgiving break. He thought it strange that Larry had not telephoned him either, but knew guiltily that did not excuse his own omission. Initially suspicious, as he was of everyone, Larry after a year or two of daily scrutiny had accepted Merrion as 'a fairly decent guy, once you get to know the kid, make allowances for him," and made him his office protege, teaching him what the job really meant and entailed, grooming him someday to take it. To Hilliard Merrion admitted: "I owe Larry. I should've shown more respect."
When the court had opened with Larry as its first clerk, the title of magistrate was not included in the statutory definition of the office that he held. But that was in fact the job he had soon begun to do, years before the law was changed. He had started exercising magisterial powers when he and Charles Spring, the first judge to preside in Canterbury, soon after taking office deduced that Spring's job would become a lot simpler and less time-consuming if the judge informally ceded to his more-than-willing clerk and comp licit fellow-investor enough actual power to decide de facto Small Claims civil matters applications for summary process brought by landlords, tradesmen and public utilities against people who had failed to pay their bills. Lane began to hold what he and the judge called 'preliminary screening hearings," putatively to enable the judge to conduct 'official sessions' more expeditiously, 'saving everybody's time."
The bill-collectors immediately perceived that this procedure was by far the quickest, surest and most efficient way to get judgments against stubborn debtors. They learned to agree to allow "Judge Spring to decide the case and sign the judgment on the basis of the memo I'll write up of this session, and then after you've seen his ruling, if you have no objection, he will sign a judgment. If you do have an objection, all you'll have to do is state it and he'll hear the case."
If within three days neither party entered an objection to Lane's memo, a judgment tracking the content of the memo was entered on the docket, carrying the "Chas. Spring' signature Lane had expertly forged.
When there was an objection, experience soon demonstrated, the judge, after rather brusquely holding the full hearing requested by a disappointed litigant tended to decide the case against that party, disappointing him again. As that understanding gained currency, the formal debt-collection process became even speedier in the Canterbury District Court. The grateful lawyers thought it fitting to be openly generous at Christmas and eager to pick up bar-tabs when they saw Lane in The Tavern after a hard day on the job.
From the beginning Lane was publicly forthright about the civil powers he'd annexed as well the power to dispose of minor criminal matters; experience on the civil side revealed to the legally savvy the meritorious economies of time and expense of the Lane approach and led to its adaptation for quick and quiet resolution of minor criminal matters especially motor vehicle violations, but no one involved saw any need to publicize that. "Phone bills; oil bills; light bills; gas bills: most people've got no idea what a mountain of chickenshit we get every day in this building," Larry said. "Until he took the judgeship, Chassy was one of them."
Spring as a somewhat-affected teenager had formed the lifetime habit of abbreviating his given name as "Chas.," when he signed it in black ink with a gold-nib bed Waterman fountain pen, copying the steel-point signature reproduced as attestation of ironclad security on the cover of every policy issued by the company his namesake grandfather had founded in 1884, Pioneer Valley Insurance. His seventh-grade teacher, amused by the mannerism, had taken it at face-value, applying the durable nickname.
"Chassy'd always been a rich kid; what'd he know? Bills came into his house and went out the next day, paid. His daddy never had to go to court and have a judge yell at him, tell he'd better pay Ralph at the Gulf station down in Ingleside for the rebuilt engine in his car; fifteen bucks out of his paycheck every week until he paid the whole three hundred. Tell him if he didn't do it, Ralph was gonna get the car. If the engine in Chassy's father's car started burning oil, Chassy's daddy knew what to do. Nothing to it: he went down to DeSaulnier Chrysler-Plymouth, picked out a nice new Imperial hardtop and wrote out a company check. When Chassy finished law school and came home to practice law, he didn't have to run himself ragged, finding a job, get himself all tuckered out. He went to work where Dad worked, in the general counsel's office of the insurance company Dad'd inherited from Granddad.
"So, when Chassy became a district court judge he was shocked by what he discovered. Up 'til then he'd thought a civil matter was something that you did in superior or federal court. You hated to, but you had no choice. Major borrower'd begun defaulting on six-figure construction-bond payments. You had to protect your investors. It wasn't something that happened to you, because you'd gotten more than two months in arrears on your TV installment payments. "And anyway, what the hell are these things, these "installment payments"? Don't people have to pay for what they get in your store before you let 'em take it home?"
"Chassy just had no idea how many people there were who didn't pay their bills for the plain and simple reason that they couldn't. They didn't make enough money to buy all the things they thought they really oughta have, but they'd gone out and bought them anyway. The first month or so we're in business here he thought the reason that we had such a volume of Small Claims business was that Arthur and Roy Carnes'd been telling the truth when they talked their buddies in the legislature into setting up this court for their very own. It was true: the four towns had really needed it. But since he thought it was all backlog, pent-up demand, he assumed in time wed clear it up. Then when we didn't, because it wasn't, he didn't know which way was up.
"Instead of getting less, we got more. Once the plaintiffs and their lawyers finally found out we were here. It was like the tide coming in. Chassy finally realized something new hadda be done.
"It isn't easy to do something new in any courthouse, this one especially. A lot of the people in here: once they got to know Chassy a little, they decided they probably were never going to like him.
There were days when I was one of 'em. He could be a fussy bastard, really get on your nerves. And he treated Lennie Judge Cavanaugh, when he first came aboard, awful young but still and all, he was another judge like he was shit. Naturally Lennie didn't like him very much, and he had company. That was why when Chassy wanted to get something done in his courthouse, it could take a pretty long time. Even when everybody else could see it was a good idea, as his ideas generally were, they were in no hurry to see it get done.
"So we had to fix the problem with Small Claims by ourselves no help from anyone else. We decided that in the afternoons I'd become a junior judge. I'd hear all the petty civil cases. That'd free up about three or four hours every day for Chassy after lunch to do what he really liked to do, and was good at doing, too: watching the stock-ticker, following the market, picking out what stocks he thought we should be investing in with all this money we now had. Which me and Fiddle and Roy naturally wanted him to be doing with his time, just as much as he did. Much better having him out there making us richer'n to have him sittin' on his ass here in the court all afternoon, hollering at a buncha poor dead-beats whose chief money problem was they didn't make enough to pay their bills.
"So what we would do was have the normal sessions in the morning, until noon or as long's it took. Then unless we had a criminal matter go to trial, the afternoon and we all tried very hard around here to make sure we wouldn't; we had those police prosecutors and the defense lawyers beltin' out plea-bargains left and right as soon as we broke for lunch Chassy'd grab his coat-n'-hat and run out the door, jump in his Chrysler and high-tail it down to the brokers in Springfield. The rest of the day that's where he'd be, happy as a pig in shit at Tucker, Anthony and R. L. Day, down there on State Street; in his element. It was home to him there; he belonged. His daddy'd started taking him there when he was a little boy. And because he was happy, and also outta here, everybody in the courthouse who didn't like him was happy too. Me especially, of course, because he was making me money."
"When Chassy called the Canterbury District Court "my court," he meant it," Lane told Merrion. "He acted like he owned the place and could do anything he liked. When people said he was arrogant, they were right.
Whether he did it on purpose, to piss people off, or he never realized how people took it; that I really never knew. I didn't really mind it, myself. He was a smart son of a bitch and he treated me all right. He helped me make money. Naturally I'd think he was a pretty okay-type of guy.
"And anyway, the fact of the matter was that when he said "This is my courthouse," he had it about right." Spring had grown up in Holyoke.
He had gone to Deerfield Academy and then to Harvard ('46) and Harvard Law School ('49) with Roy Carnes. Carnes in 1952 had won the first of the five terms he would serve in the state House of Representatives, representing the easterly part of Holyoke along with the towns of Canterbury, Hampton Pond, Hampton Falls and Cumberland. In 1960, Holyoke voters approved his all-but-hereditary succession to the state Senate seat held by his uncle, Arthur, forced by failing health to retire.
Virtually by acclamation, Arthur had won what became known as 'the Carnes senate seat' when the death of the incumbent opened it in 1946.
That had been less than a year after he was invalided home from World War II army service in Europe. He had lost his left arm during the drive for the Rhine. When he died in May of 1966, a fellow WW II veteran and friend of many years, Holyoke Transcript Telegram city editor and weekly columnist Reg Gault collected and published a full page of tributes to him, ending with his own: "Arthur was entitled to wear the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and three Purple Hearts. He seldom did.
"He figured in many eyewitness stories of combat heroism. I didn't hear them from him; I heard them from other soldiers, who had fought alongside him. Arthur was born in this city in 1913. He went away to school, and then he spent those war years in Europe. He took his legislative work seriously, as he took everything except himself, and so until his health forced his retirement, he kept an apartment in Boston, where he spent much of his time. "Far too much of it," he would tell you, voicing just about the only complaint I ever heard him utter, "too far from my home, from my friends, and much too far from Grey Hills," the club he'd been instrumental in creating on the abandoned estate of Jesse Grey, and the golf game he'd astonishingly somehow learned to play again with one arm "not quite as well, though," he would say after his war wound.
"His home, then, always was here. Wherever his life and work and service to his country took him, he never really left. His heart and spirit remained in Holyoke and this valley along the Connecticut River, with the people that he knew and served so very well. He never forgot where he came from.
"He always knew who he was. He never lost sight of the job he had to do. He was a devoted son, husband and father, an honest and far-sighted public servant, the kind of candidate who gives meaning to the term "public service," a hero and the best friend a man could have.
Raise a glass today to Arthur Carnes Ave atque vale."
The Carneses, Arthur in the Senate and Roy in the House, had first combined in 1954 to carve the Canterbury District Court jurisdiction out of the Holyoke, Chicopee, Palmer and Northampton Districts. There was merit to the rationale they publicized. The continuing escalation of the Cold War made it likely the civilian population around the US Air Force Strategic Air Command base at Westover Field would increase, as more and more Air Force dependents moved in. The Fisk Tire Company was working two shifts to meet the booming demand for real rubber tires to replace the synthetics rationed in wartime. The new Monsanto plant in Springfield was attracting young workers and their growing families.
The University of Massachusetts at Amherst was expanding. And, as Larry Lane said, there didn't seem to be any reason to think business would be tailing off at the Tampax factory in Palmer.
"Like it or not," Arthur said in the Senate, 'more people means more work for our court system, just as surely as it means more work for our school systems and our hospitals, more demands upon our water systems and our highways. Either we expand our facilities and agencies or we overcrowd and overload them to the point at which they simply cannot get their jobs done, and break down. If we expect and want the prosperity of our cities and towns to continue, with the population growth that good times economically attract, we have to be prepared to pay the price in necessary services. We need another court."
The Carneses had intended that Arthur would become its first presiding justice, but by the time Chassy Spring's building committee Chicopee assistant clerk of court Larry Lane served it as consultant and Fiddle Barrows's construction people had the building ready for occupancy, early in 1957, Arthur's prostate cancer had been diagnosed. The prognosis was encouraging, Arthur's regular physician having digitally detected the growth early. But his cancer specialist said that in his view with radiation treatment and chemotherapy ahead of him, Arthur was probably going to find himself having to spend a lot of his time in a hospital Johnny at Mass. General in Boston, and would most likely be more comfortable and have a better chance of recovery if he stayed close by. "Particularly since you've already got your apartment in Charles River Park. Instead of getting yourself into a new situation where you have to travel a hundred miles every time you have to come in."
"So there they were," Larry Lane said. "Arthur and Roy with their brand-new courthouse and nobody to put in it. Except me, of course, I was ready enough. Anything to get out of Chicopee and away from that bastard Popowski. Maurice was a son of a bitch. So they had a clerk.
But they also needed a judge.
"Roy thought about it and decided he didn't want it. Too early for him to put himself out to pasture. He was still in his thirties, waiting to take Arthur's seat in the Senate, still thinking maybe some day he might make a run for Congress." In 1962, when Roy moved up, Dan Hilliard, a Holyoke alderman because of strong though private Carnes support, won his first election to Roy's former seat in the House.
"It's hard for me to think now only fifteen years've gone by since we opened the place," Larry said to Merrion. "So much's happened since then. Take me for example, what's happened to me. You want the truth, I thought what happened to the Carneses was kind of funny. The two of them had it all planned out so neat, so firm, so fully packed, so quick and easy on the draw. Then the doctor sticks his finger up Arthur's ass, finds a little bulge up there that don't seem right to him, and "That's it. All bets're off. It's time to make new plans." Serves me right, I guess, that now it's happening to me. I'm on terminal leave."
Bureaucratically terminal meant 'using up vacation time before formally commencing retirement," but in Larry's case it carried another one of its meanings as well. He hadn't told anyone outside of his family.
Until his mind was changed by Merrion's visit, he hadn't planned to tell anyone else.
His eyes had instantly filled up when he saw who was at his door.
"Where the hell've you been?" he said, his voice clogging up, grabbing the Christmas whiskey with his left hand, using his right to pull Merrion into the apartment.
"I just found out, Thursday," Merrion said, shutting the door behind him. "I would've come over yesterday but I hadda stay with my mother.
My brother Chris didn't show up again, the shit, and she got all upset I couldn't leave her on Christmas. But I didn't know, you're here by yourself. I just assumed you're okay. I know now I should've asked.
But no one told me. I feel awful bad about this, Larry. Should've given you a call."
"Ahh," Lane said, shaking his head, clearing his throat, 'never mind the details, pal; stick to the important things. First thing is to get some ice here. Then we can figure out who's to blame, you for not calling or me. Not all your fault, you didn't know. Glad to see you's what's important. Kind of lonesome here. Not as tough as I thought."
He put the bottle on the red Formica counter dividing the kitchen from the dining area and opened the refrigerator freezer door. He put the tray on the counter and then rested his hands on the surface and gazed at Merrion. In a flat voice he said: "Doctor says I'm dying, Amby. He gives me a year to live and says it's not going to be fun. It's lung cancer, both of them. I'm too old for one of those new transplant-operations and it's too far along to stop. I'm numberin' out my days and as far's my family's concerned, I can do it by myself."
His wife and his kids had made his choice clear: he'd 'either quit drinking, get a second opinion, maybe have surgery, radiation and the chemotherapy, and at least do my best to get better," or else he would have to get out. "They said she couldn't take it, watching me die, without at least tryin' to get better."
He snorted. "Which is never gonna happen, me get better, matter what I do, or don't." Talking made him wheeze. "Everybody knows it; nobody ever does. Doesn't matter what the hell I do to myself or let someone else do to me better I'm not gonna get.
But that's the choice my family gives me. Get better or out of their lives."
He told Merrion that he'd asked for time. "I've seen what all that medical business does to a guy. It slows the dying down, I guess, lets him live a little longer. I don't argue with none of that. But what they do to you guarantees you're not gonna enjoy any life you get afterwards. If they'd drug you enough -morphine, maybe some of that heroin the cops've got in their evidence locker make you happy no matter how shitty you felt or how much of you's even left, well then, that'd be a whole different thing. Something like that I might go for.
But this other shit? I don't want it. When I go, what goes will be me. Me, pissin' and moanin' like always, not some dim bulb that finally burned out. That's all I was asking them for, time to die my own way."
Describing the outrage to Merrion had made Lane indignant again, and therefore very emphatic. "Not more time to live, you understand. I wasn't asking for that. Not looking for miracles here. Not from that bunch, at least, fuckin' damned ingrates they are. Just some time to think. Seemed reasonable to me. After all, I've supported the whole fuckin' raft of 'em," Larry had eight children, 'all of these fuckin' years. Roof over their heads; warm dry place to sleep; pretty good food, by and large. Didn't cook it, no, but I paid for it oughta get some credit for that. Court's indulgence, as we say? Couple of days, over the weekend, decide which life I'd like better, little short one I've got left. I needed some time to think. "Sunday night be all right, say? After the Celtics game? I'll give you my answer then."
"They were pissed off. "In other words, Dad, you're gonna drink your way through another weekend, right? Just like you always've done. And then come Sunday night, when you're totally shit-faced, will've been for two whole days, that's when you make up your mind? Like your head'll be clearer then?"
"They actually had that much fucking nerve. "You bastards," I thought.
"You bastards," I said, "you fuckin' bastards. So this then is what it comes down to. Forty-two fuckin' years I've been working, counting the service and all, and now I finally retire, don't have to work anymore.
And what do I find out that makes me? Your prisoner. I gotta do what you say.
What an honor. Takes my breath away. Gimme the whiskey instead."
"Then I stomp out and go back down the courthouse. Gonna change my pension plan. None of them get any of it, all my years of damned hard work. Started six years before any of them came along. Eight of 'em didn't even exist. I created my own enemies. Am I feelin' sorry for myself, at this point? You bet cher your ass I am, Amby.
"Now this stuff in here," he'd gestured around, his one-bedroom apartment number 11 at the rear, on the second floor, with its dreary-brown, early-winter view of Ransom's Brook flowing down the cement trench 'this is what I've got left. But it's pretty grand, don't you think?"
Larry was beginning slyly to explain. The wind eddied groaning around the already-pitting aluminum sashes of the cheap double-glazed windows, ill-fitted into the brickwork, from the maker of the windows in the almost-new courthouse, the lower corners of the double glass already fogged in white crescent shapes with moisture condensed from vapor penetrating the thin rubber sealant. Merrion'd tried to look favorably impressed, but he wasn't. He thought it didn't look like much.
Larry hadn't been fooled. He'd grinned like a Doberman. "Yeah, right, I know. It isn't. It's cheap shit, built to a price, all right?
Building-to-price's the way you make money on an investment property like this. Cheap buildings bring in a real profit, even if they do look ten years old from the day when you first turn the key. It's a fat little pot fulla gold at the end of a rainbow; every month it gets fuller."
"They don't know," Larry said to Merrion. "Not one of my family's got a clue. Never told Richie either. Decided a long time ago I don't like the guy. Chassy appointed him, favor to Roy Carnes, but Chassy never made me think I oughta trust the guy, or that he did, either. And anyway, the fewer people that know what you're really up to, better off everyone is.
"You get a family yourself some day? This dame of yours ever gets her thinking straight, two of you settle down an' have kids? Beautiful, good for you. Good health and prosperity; may there be many days in their lives, and the sun shine on every damned one. I hope they treat you lots better'n mine treated me. But the same advice holds, either way. Tell 'em nothin' beyond what they need to know, case tomorrow you're hit by a bus. The rest let 'em find out after you're dead, you're still on speaking terms then.
"That's what I always did. They didn't know what the stakes really were, how much they had riding on me. What keeping me happy was actually worth. How much effort they oughta put in. That's why they thought they could get so high and mighty with me. They had no idea what it'd really cost 'em, what they'd be losing, if they went and got me pissed off. The pension was all they knew about, see? Well, all of my kids now, they've done pretty well thanks of course to the way that I brought them up, but you're not gonna hear that from them. They can take care of my wife, if they have to, without even breathing hard, right? So my pension for Ginny they're willing to risk, I guess, if they've even thought about that.
"So as a result, after what those pricks did to me, I'm on my way back down the office. The minute that I get there, the first thing I am gonna do is change that fuckin' pension. What they bet, they lost.
Gonna screw them right out of it. Just like they all screwed me out of the rest of my life, right to die in my own fuckin' house, when they put me out in the street.
"But by the time I get down there, I've changed my mind. "Fuck 'em 's what I've now decided. What'll I care, my wife gets the pension? I'll be dead and buried, six feet under 'fore they find out what I did to her, got even. And then they'll go out and start bad-mouthin' me. Make me look like shit, all over town: my poor widow, she ain't got a dime.
What a bastard I was; I left her destitute, all the rest of that crap.
Right here, in my very own town, which I've lived in all my life. And I wont be around to fight back. Tell all the people what they did to me, treatin' me like a sack-ah brown shit, I had the nerve to get sick.
What good is that gonna do me? '"No, better like this." That was what I decided. Better if they never know, the rotten bastards, about all the other stuff there was, they never dreamed of. The big boodle. That's where the real revenge is. Not takin' it with me, no, still can't do that, but I can keep it away from them. That's as good as you can do, at least. Almost as good in the end, Slick, wouldn't you say? Almost as good in the end."
It'd taken Larry longer than his doctors and he had expected, dying at the pace set by the cancer, but doing it his way. He hadn't finished up until just before Columbus Day in 1972, twenty-one slow, hard months later. Merrion had visited him at least once during each of eighty-two of those eighty-seven weeks that Larry Lane lived at 1692 Ike.
During the first week of March in '72 Merrion had been pretty much recovered from the flu that had sent him to bed during four days of the last week of February, but still feared he might infect Larry. Each year he had taken the same nine days of vacation that he'd started taking in 1962, the first year he'd been on actual salary with Danny the last week of June and the first week of July, combining vacation days with the holiday for the Fourth. Beginning in '66 he attended the annual clerks' conventions during his time away each June. The first week in July was his one-quarter share of the month's rental of the two-bedroom cottage he rented with Dan and Marcia Hilliard at Swift's Beach in Wareham, and he spent it there fucking Sunny Keller, when she came home on leave from the Air Force to him as the summer herself, even the July it rained.
Over twenty years later he still missed Sunny Keller, and every so often late at night in the card room at Grey Hills when he had had enough to drink, he would shake his head and say it again, right out hud but softly, that he still didn't see why she felt she had to volunteer to go and take a chance on getting herself killed, and then actually get killed, and then he would say 'fucking war," even though it hadn't really been the war that killed her just a heavy rain in Hawaii that could've fallen anywhere. But without the war it wouldn't've fallen onto her. One night Dan Hilliard'd had a few drinks too, and he'd begun to feel sad himself. "You think, you silly bastard," Danny had said, 'you think you were the only one."
"You son of a bitch, I do not," Merrion had said. '1 know very much better'n that, god damn it. I know she fucked other guys. Sunny always fucked other guys. But I couldn't help that, you know. There was nothin' I could do about that."
"Not fucking, goddammit," Hilliard had said. "Not fucking I'm talking about. I meant it was you thinking you were the one, that you were the one that was crazy about Sunny. And you were jus' wrong about that. It was everyone, all of us, ever' damn body, always liked Sunny, right off. And more'n a few of us even got so we loved her. Not that we fucked her, I didn't mean that, but we also loved her. We did. So you shouldn't think that, that it was just you, that it was just you that loved Sunny. "Cause it wasn't just you that loved Sunny. That was the way that she was."
All the other weeks except for flu and his vacations, Merrion had gone to see Larry. Every time he'd gone there, he'd said the same thing.
"Just dropped by, see how you're do in'."
"Checkin' up on me," you mean," Larry had replied every time, wheezing it out and then coughing deeply, moaning as he dredged another shallow air-passage through the viscous tide collecting in his lungs. "See what progress I'm makin'." Igniting another Lucky Strike; gradually devouring and dissolving himself from the inside out, the brown whiskey yellowing his skin; even using two reagents, the process still took its luxurious time.
"You got to be patient," Larry had said. "After all, it stands to reason, am I right? Takes seven years to make the stuff, age it -isn't that what they claim it takes? Bound to take it a while to work. But I don't mind. I'm in no real hurry here to clear out. But I got no desire to hang around, either. Either way, perfectly all right with me."
Over the course of the twenty-one months the building had become etched in clear detail in Merrion's mind, the three-story, eighteen-unit rectangle squatting cramped on a mingy acre-and-an-eighth shelf of land ('being approximately 49,005 square feet, more or less," the deed to the trust recited) filled and levelled with the wreckage of buildings demolished in Urban Renewal projects in Springfield, Holyoke and Chicopee, putting a questionably buildable site in place of the nine-percent grade of the natural ravine cut by Ransom's Brook. The fill pulverized brick, thick greyish clay, mulched fibreboard, chunks of cement glittered with shards of window-glass and china; bent steel spikes and rough zinced rods stuck up between dead blades of grass browned and
flattened by the early frosts. Larry Lane and the other four men in the Fourmen's Realty Trust had gotten the fill free for their investment. "Must've been damned near two hundred loads," Larry said, confirming what Merrion's eyes told him. The place had been built on debris.
"Crap built on crap," Larry said, laughing. "Just like the people who live in it now more stuff that nobody wanted. We got it for the cartage, for taking it away. Fiddle Barrow gave his drivers all the hours they could stand. When they finished his contract work for the day, had them go and get it, bring it over here. Eight, ten tons at a time, dumped it right down the slope of that ravine there, right to the edge of the cement trench. Lot of it didn't stop at the edge, went right along into the brook. But what the hell did we care, huh? Wasn't costing us anything. No one saw it go in. There was always plenty more."
Number 14, Janet's unit, was at the front, on the third floor of the six-unit stack to the left of the entrance on the westerly end of the building. The other twelve, Numbers 2 through 19, skipping 13, were stacked on the easterly side of the door, four units on each of the floors. Janet knew the habits of others in the building, people whose names she didn't know; she'd deduced their business by watching them.
"From my fucking picture window," she'd said once, matter-of-factly, mildly startling Merrion. "Some fucking dumb pictures I get from it.
Better stuff on stupid TV. OJ: I was watching that. More innaresting stuff n people in my building've got going, onna TV there." She attended the lives of the other tenants as though they had been staged for her, like the athletic events and movies she watched avidly. She preferred professional hockey, she told Merrion, "specially when they have the fights," seldom missing any game broadcast, no matter which teams were playing. Like the other people in her building they were features of the video in her life, silent players passing through it, their purposes unstated, their function as far as she was concerned being to entertain her. She thought that few of them tried hard enough, no matter what resentments she expressed by grumbling at them.
She did that a lot. She had plenty of time. Far too much of it, in Merrion's estimation; it allowed her the leisure to overheat her imagination, already running on more mood elevators than Merrion believed could possibly be good for her. Xanax, he thought it was, that Sammy Paradise'd said, assuming his own source was telling the truth. But that was not a safe assumption; Lowell Chappelle was the source, the probationer snooping around in his girlfriend's apartment for damaging information about her, who had heedlessly taken him in.
Chappelle was assuming Janet hadn't substituted something else for what'd come in the Xanax-labelled bottle that he'd seen when he browsed her bathroom medicine cabinet. She'd mentioned Elavil at least once to Merrion. Janet knew her drugs.
Louella Daggett was no help. She wouldn't tell Merrion what elixirs Janet was on, beyond confirming she'd been given something that would make the world spin nice and slow and even, no bumps. Louella cited rules of confidentiality Merrion did not believe existed, or should not if they did.
Janet had nothing in her life but raw time. When she sat in her best chair to watch her shows all day on TV, and her hockey games at night Boston and Providence Bruins; Hartford Whalers; Springfield Indians, Kings, Falcons; New York Islanders; Rangers; or New Jersey Devils; God only knows which teams or how many after she got back from Dineen's convenience store each morning, that was all she had: time, nothing but time. She was waiting to die.
Sam Paradisio thought Chapelle could make it happen for her. He thought Chappelle had done it to others, committed murder. "Just because nobody ever caught him at it, that doesn't mean the bastard hasn't done it. There was this one bank that got robbed, 'way the hell out in western New York State, Olean, during the time that he was out before he went in this last time that he got caught. All the earmarks of a Big Sid Charpinsky job that was his neck of the woods, out that way, part of the world he come from. He was in the Rockingham County Jail up in New Hampshire, there, Exeter, same time Chappelle was in for an armored car thing he did. The two of them became asshole buddies.
"Bastards do not stay put any more. They refuse to just stay in one place nowadays, where a man can keep an eye on them. They're all over the place now like horse shit. Well, I saw the surveillance photos on that one, the New York job. The US Attorney showed them to me, and they showed this one poor bastard getting' mowed down. Just getting' fuckin' riddled he was. And the guy that was doin' it looked an awful lot to me like my friend Lowell, guy who's usin' the Mac Ten. Wearin' a mask, but even so, more than a passin' resemblance. The same build, and the same way he's got of movin', way he carries himself. We know what Chappelle is capable of.
Army trained him too good. He could be anyone's killer. Available, formal occasions. Weddings and funerals, bar mitzvahs. Bastard'd have to get his own eight-hundred number, there'd be so much demand for his work."
Merrion rejected that notion at once. It alarmed him. He didn't like being alarmed. Larry'd said one day to him when he was still feeling really good, which usually meant savage and mean: "I've reached that magic age where I only have to do the fuckin' things I want to do, and only think about the things I fuckin' like to think about. So, if I don't like to do it, it's a thing that I don't like, or I don't like to think it, well then, my friend, then I don't." Merrion had agreed with Larry at the time, and now, approaching the same age, agreed with Larry even more, even though he was dead and had been dead for more than twenty years. Another legacy from Larry: words to be dead by.
Still the thought lingered, skulking around in the back of his head, bothering him with its shadow. "I'm never gonna leave this place,"
Larry Lane'd said to him. "Well, I go out now and then, time to time, right now. And I'm gonna leave, of course some day I'm gonna have to.
But the only way I'm gonna do it is when the six guys bring the long black car around. Then, well, I'll have to leave."
Somehow or other about a year or so into Larry's last mission Richie Hammond'd found out that Merrion had been going to visit him. "Every week, is it?" Richie'd said to him. "Every week you go up there, and stay about two hours! What the hell you do up there with him, up there in that place with that shrivelled-up old bastard he is, all that time alone with him? Guy's fuckin' dyin' isn't he? That's what I hear, every place I go. Everyone says it, all over town. "Larry Lane isn't long for this world," 's what I hear. "Larry Lane's on his way out, this time." That's what everyone's sayin'." Then he had paused and looked hopeful, waiting for confirmation.
Merrion had not said anything. He had shrugged, throwing in the eyebrow-raising. He did that whenever Richie started irritating him, which was fairly often. It wasn't insubordinate not that Richie as a practical matter could harm him in any way at all. Even if he did start keeping a log and writing it up whenever Merrion yanked his chain; as long as Danny Hilliard had access to a telephone that worked and a friend alive on Beacon Hill, it would take St. Michael the Archangel to lay a bad hand on Ambrose Merrion.
His silence pissed Richie off. That was another thing Richie didn't know how to do right, get pissed off properly. And usefully, so's to set a precedent, one that people would shudder to remember and try not to do again whatever it was that had set him off. He just got plaintive and made himself look ridiculous. "Well answer me, for Christ sake, Amby. I asked you a fuckin' question." That was why Merrion did it. "What the hell do you do up there with him, for Christ sake? The man's a dyin, fuckin', man."
Merrion had shrugged again, but this time as Riche'd begun to work up another pisspot eruption, he'd given him words to go with it. "We tell each other stories," he'd said blandly. "Well, Larry tells me the stories, how things used to be. What went on, and what it all meant.
History lessons of this place. I mostly just listen, nod now and then.
Sometimes I ask him a question. But you know, there're days, when we had something' happen. Something's gone wrong down here. And as he knows and you know and I know myself, most days something generally has. And those weeks I have something to say. Stories to tell him, put some fun in his life."
That had enraged Richie. He'd come out of his chair. He slammed both his fists knuckles-down on the top of the very desk Merrion now occupied, so hard that it had to've hurt, and then braced himself on his stiffened, locked arms. His face had gone crimson immediately, right up to the roots of his brown greying hair. His voice'd gone up along with the blood pressure. "You son of a bitch you; you son of a bitch; you son of a goddamn-damned bitch. You're tellin' Larry Lane what we're doin' in here? You getting' his input on stuff? You're getting' his clearance on stuff? He hasn't got no more power in here.
That bastard is retired, even if he isn't dyin' like everyone else knows he is and they are glad. Once you are retired from here, that is the end of your power. Then you have got no more power in here and you might as well be dead, like you are gonna be. You cut that stuff out now, right now."
According to Sam Paradisio's very best hearsay, Janet's most dangerous conduct was her smoking habit. "And this is not because I think everyone should quit today and then if they wont do it on their own, the government should make them. I'm the only person whose smoking ever bothered me, and I am in favor of letting people kill themselves any way they like. What I am not in favor of is other people killing them, for any reason whatsoever, and this lady's smoking habit, about two packs a day, could be something that will do that, make that happen. For her this is high-risk behavior.
"What makes me say this is that's what my violent hardened felon tells me. He's pretty specific. When he was in jail, they put in that No Smoking rule, and he hadda cold-turkey the habit. He said it was a real bitch.
'"Way worsen going off cocaine, or the booze or the pills. You can still get the butts, sure, but when you do you can't smoke 'em. Well, there're ways, but they're hard. How can you smoke without making smoke, which all the damned screws can then smell? If they don't actually see it. Pills and the other stuff: those you can do without anyone seeing you do it. But havin' a smoke: that's really hard. When they said you couldn't have any more of that, you really couldn't, just about, so that one's a real motherfucker."
Sammy Paradise had reported his conversation with Chappelle to Merrion over lunch on Friday of the previous week, the second in August. They had occupied their usual dark-brown oak booth in The Tavern on the northerly side of the green opposite the Strand Theater in the center of Canterbury, a block from the courthouse. Also as usual they could talk about confidential matters because they had the place pretty much to themselves; the restaurant workers paid no attention to their conversation and because they met at 1:15 when the court was in recess, there were no other customers.
Merrion was having a good sixteen-ounce strip sirloin steak broiled medium rare, a baked potato with sour cream and chives and a salad glistening with oil and vinegar dressing. He had nearly finished a pint of Lowenbrau dark beer and he planned to order another 'for dessert." Paradisio was eating a chicken salad sandwich on dark bread and as customary nursing a twelve-ounce glass of Miller Lite that he did not intend to finish.
Paradisio said Chappelle told him Janet's smoking was 'the only thing about her he's got strong feelings about. He really doesn't like it.
Because when she does it, it makes him want to smoke. And it was real hard for him to quit. He told her that and she said she can't stop.
She used to smoke even more, she told him, but then a while back she cut down. And she's got it down now to the point where she can actually ration them.
"He tells me that drives him nuts. "I could never do that. And I am a guy that they made quit completely. I know what I'm talking about.
Only smoke so many a day? Guarantee you, that'd drive me nuts."
"He acts like he's got her on surveillance. This's obviously become an obsession with the guy, keepin' track how much she smokes. "When she goes to bed at night she's got about four or five, maybe half a dozen of them left. Just enough to get her through the morning, just 'til she goes out again. Sittin' onnie edge the bed, there, 'fore the shower an' shampoo. Then: after she gets dressed and puts the coffee-maker on, dries herself off, an' brushes her hair. To dry it in the air, before she uses the hair-dryer. "Not as many split-ends," she tells me," this's him, now, tellin' me, '"when you do it this way you don't get so many split-ends." '"She says. Maybe that takes two butts. Mark down two for that, brings us up to three. Coffee's ready, ahh, then sugar, milk, have another one or two while she's drinkin' that. Now it's time to get dressed and go out the store, get ahold of a paper. Don't hafta actually go and buy it; just look up the page there where they print last night's number and see right there if you won. Scratch-ticket, large coffee. Use ten dollars' worth of food stamps, something costs about five bucks 'nd change. Leaves her enough to get change back to use for more smokes. Two more new fresh decks of butts. Something to look forward to, may turn out to be the only thing all day. Scratch the ticket. Have another one while you're doing that, or maybe on the way back. Six, I think, that makes it. Maybe seven, you lose count.
Not that it really matters."
"That's how I get it from Lowell. "Smokin's the principal thing in her life, when she's all by herself. What she does when she's doin' everything else, or not doin' a damned thing at all. She's a real junkie on those things." For him, this is an obsession.
"Lowell with an obsession's an idea that bothers me," Paradise said.
"It bothers me because I think he's tellin' me the truth when he says her smokin' gets to him. It makes him worry she might be the cause of him going back to smoking again. He's aware that it's possible he might get unlucky again, doing something that he knows he shouldn't do like robbing another bank or something. And if he gets caught doing it, which he knows's always a risk in that line of work, that would mean that he'd end up going back inside again. If he ever gets lugged again and almost anything'd do it, record like he's got; parking overtime'd be enough that'll be all it'll take. Put him right back in the can, and this time it'll be for all day, the entire rest of his natural. Habitual criminal, multiple loser like he is, the new law could be "Ten strikes and you're out" he would still qualify, easy.
"So, say he hasn't got anything in mind right now, any special thing he's got in mind to get a large amount of money fast. That's good, but with him it's always been kind of a temporary condition; he's always in it 'til he spots something that looks like prime pickings. "Candy," is what he calls it; a job that's too good to resist. Well, he's older now, lost a yard or two off his fastball, and he swears he's reformed.
But in the back of his mind he still has to think it could happen again. Some big opportunity might turn up any day, and Lowell just wouldn't be able to pass it up. He knows himself pretty well by this time, what his limitations are. He gets hot pants when he sees a job he thinks he can knock over easy. Major temptations're hard for him to resist.
"This's a big country. When he's been able to, Lowell's always been footloose, but he's spent a lot of years inside and he hasn't seen all of it yet. He knows somewhere he hasn't been yet there's bound to be another temptation he couldn't bear to turn down. The only reason he hasn't gone for it yet is that he hasn't seen it. If he sees it, he knows he'll say Yes.
"So he might get caught again. If does, he's back inside. They're not going to let him smoke. He'll have to quit again. Lowell ain't sure he could do that. He's dead sure he doesn't want to.
"That's why I think he's tellin' the truth, that he's pokin' her all the time and he likes that all right, but it bugs him that she smokes.
I don't think this's good news for this boneheaded broad that you've got on your hands here, wasn't too bright to begin with. This is a dangerous man.
"He's proven it, many times. The videos of him in banks when he's been robbing them show a very scary man in a state of cold homicidal rage, capable of doing anything. You would not want to've been in one of them, getting cash on your MasterCard, when Lowell and some friends stopped by to make a withdrawal. The people who've attended his robberies in person 've testified that he's frightening to behold.
"Terrifying' is a word they often use.
"This is the man whose woman's smoking truly infuriates him. He likes screwing her and having her blow him. For that he has to be around her, so he tries not to let her smoking make him mad. But self-control isn't Lowell's stock in trade. Self-restraint isn't something that he's good at, especially where sex's also involved.
"This guy is what teenage boys wish they were. He's a sex engine. In the place where you and I have got our penises, he's got a jack-hammer.
He's what they call a paraph iliac He's got an abnormally powerful sex drive. There really is such a thing as being sexually insatiable, and he is that. When he's been in the can, they've had to put him in solitary several times for sexually running amok, assaulting other inmates. Either he wants to bugger them and they don't want him to, or else he wants them to blow him and they're not keen on that either, so as a result he's going to beat on them until they see it his way.
"Keep in mind what kind of polished gentlemen make up our prison populations. These guys that he's threatening are thugs themselves, hardened criminals like him and they're afraid of him.
"When he's been in solitary, locked up by himself; knowing there's a TV camera on him every minute; no access to any erotic material outside his own diseased imagination; he's been observed masturbating to orgasm eleven times in one twenty-four-hour period. In that same period he also had a wet dream. He'd been jerking off all day that is what they had him doing; merrily watchin' dirty movies every half hour or so.
Then he went to sleep for a while, five or six hours, I guess and while he was asleep he got hard and came off again. And then when he woke up, the first thing he did was jack off.
"This was at one of the institutions where the psychologist got permission to test this new aversion-therapy on him. It sounds like some kind of a fantastic joke, but it's some starry-eyed nitwit's bright idea of a new treatment for sex offenders child molesters; bell-ringers; guys who beat up prostitutes; rapists."
"Every type of leading citizen," Merrion said.
"Right," Paradisio said. "I guess no one's ever proven it works, but then no one's ever proven any of the standard, traditional approaches've worked either. I don't think anyone's ever come up with a cure for those guys they could demonstrate was reliable. So you could ever feel really comfortable letting them loose. Basically they show the dirty pervert all kinds of filthy stuff, find out what really turns him on. Then overpower him with it: Show him dirty movies and let him beat his meat until it's raw or it falls off, whichever comes first. It sounds to me almost as though it oughta be cruel and unusual punishment, stir the guy up into such a frenzy that he does that to himself; has so much fun he really hurts himself."
"While the medics thoughtfully look on and take notes, I presume,"
Merrion said. "All in the interest of science, of course. Are we still sure we know which one of these people in the playroom's the guy who's got the problem? Or is it just possible that both of them're now upstanding one from watching the movies, the other one from watching the watcher?"
"That was my first thought," Paradisio said. "Anyway, when they put Chappelle in the box and made him watch porn flicks all day, he took to it right off. He really seemed to like it."
"Oh, I bet he did," Merrion said. "Much better 'n re shelving the books in the prison library. Much more fun watching' "Debbie do Dallas" 'n it is mopping down the dining hall. What'd he do, set a new record for the pony-lope?"
"They shut the VCR off after three hours," Paradisio said. "By then he'd finished off five erections."
"Very impressive," Merrion said. "They should groom him for the Olympics. Maybe the way to rehab this guy is get him a movie tryout.
If he doesn't get stage-fright, he could be worth a fortune. He's not a bad guy after all; just a poor unhappy kid who missed his true calling in life."
"Yeah," Paradise said, 'but they didn't do that, so as a result I've got him. What I'm afraid'll happen is that some night after he and Lady Janet've been drinking and he's been in her a couple or three times, he'll be ready again before she is. And she'll say "No, let's wait a minute, honey. Take a break and have a smoke, make ourselves another drink. We got all night to play." And he'll go berserk and either kill her for putting him off or else force her do it, and in the process be so rough he'll kill her without meaning to. Not that it'll matter much to her."
"If he's telling the truth," Merrion said. "Dangerous guys don't always do that, as I'm sure you probably know." He did not wish to believe that Chappelle was a threat. If he was then he would first have to think of something he could do that would keep Janet safe, and then he would have to do it. That would be more work for him. "More work's against the chief clerk's religion," Larry Lane had said.
"Well, yeah," Paradisio said, 'but like I say: I don't think he's lying to me. He doesn't have anything to gain by doing it. Why lie if it doesn't get you anything? He doesn't give enough of a shit about me or the pathetic little things that I can do to him. Put him back in jail?
It's practically his second home. I don't care, but it's still bad news for the broad. She's pissing him off. That's never a wise thing to do.
"I think you should at least tell her. He's not doing this 'cause he's in love. Because he likes her, even feels sorry for her. He's fucking her because she's got the equipment, what he prefers to get the job done. Brains're not included in that, so it's okay with him that she's not only stupid but probably not right in the head, talks ragtime or isn't all there. Dependable pussy is what he's after, and that's what she's offering this week. This week and the week after next. If her talk starts to distract, he just buys her another drink. And if one pop doesn't quite do the job, another one after it will. Sooner or later she'll pass out on him, and then he can go to sleep. Knowing he'll get back into her again two or three times in the morning.
"Lowell Chappelle is a practical man. Half-breeds're often that way, I've noticed. Used to working the fringes; they get pretty good at the game. You've got to find some way to warn her, and make her understand she's being warned."
"If you just bought a carton of cigarettes, you mean," Merrion said to Janet. "If you bought a carton, say, every five days, then you wouldn't need to go down to Dineen's every morning, the way you do now.
Then only every fifth day."
"Well, maybe every three or four days," she said. "I've always been:
"Have I got it?" Then I'll have it. The booze and the pills, and the cigarettes, too. Or if I had something to sniff." She frowned. "Which I haven't been doing for quite a long time. I wouldn't want you thinkin' that. But when I did, when I was doin' that, that was the way that I did it, all right? Just like with everything else. If I've got it, I'll use it. No matter how long it's supposed to last me, I'll use it if I got it around."
"I wasn't suggesting…" Merrion said, 'anything like that. I didn't mean anything like that. That you might be back on the stuff.
You gave me your word, you wouldn't do that you were all finished with that stuff. And that was an important part of our deal, that you'd keep that promise to me. Because otherwise, you know, all bets were off. No help from me with the judge. Or with the people over at Welfare, or with the building super, either, up at the place you live.
Well, so far as I know, you have done that, stayed clean. So I'm still trying to help you."
"Because those fuckin' neighbors of mine I've got up there," she said, 'they are real nosy people, and mean. The people who were there when I moved in there, like you said, when you got me in, those were very nice people there then. I got along with them good. But then one at a time, they all seem to've moved out. Always just one at a time. Almost so you wouldn't notice. And then if you did, well, you'd just assume, the new ones'll be just like them.
"But it didn't turn out that way. These're not nice people there now.
These're a very mean, loud, kind of people. I don't like them. I'd like to do something to them. Spray-paint their cars or something like that. Get back at them for how they act. But I don't. I don't do anna thing say nothin', to them. I just go along there, minding my business, not a care in the world. Don't give them no bullshit at all.
I'm not that kind of person. But I'm not so sure about them. I think if they wanted, get rid of a person, you know? That they might start thinkin' how to do it, that would hurt their reputation. And if they couldn't find something out, well, it's not like I'm sayin' I know they've done this, they got you all concerned here like you are today, so you thought you had to see me."
"I have to see you every month, Janet," he said wearily. "It's part of our arrangement, and by now I shouldn't have to tell you again, every month when you come in. When I have someone call you and remind you to come in, it doesn't necessarily mean I've heard something about you. Or that I haven't, either. It's just time for you to come and see me and let me see how you're doing."
"I know, but I'm just sayin'," she said, 'that if they told you something then they must've made it up. "Cause they didn't see nothin'. All I am sayin' here is that they could've, they could've done that, it's the kind of thing they might do."
She looked anxious and wrung her hands. "You see what I'm sayin' to you? They're the type of people that would, would do something like that, make up some bad things, just to get someone in trouble. These are very mean people. They would do that to me. They would do that to anyone, really. They wouldn't stop at anna thing It wouldn't matter to them. Somebody really should do, you know, something about them.
Someone really should. Before they go and hurt somebody else. They really don't care what they do, as long as they get their own way."
She paused and thought, frowning, looking at the floor. She nodded, as though satisifed she had settled something in her mind that had troubled her. "I could do it myself," she said, looking up and nodding again. "I could fix them myself if I hadda. I don't know if you know this, if this's something I told you, before, but I can take care of myself. A lot of people; all my life a lot of people've been always thinking I couldn't do that, take care of myself. And some of them thought, well, they tried to do things to me. And then they were very surprised. I gave them a big surprise. I can do things. So I could, if I hadda, do something. And I would, too. Except for this thing I got, that you got over me; maybe it'd be better this time if you did it instead. If you did something to them for me. That I shouldn't, you know, do anything? Might get me in more trouble here?"
"No, you shouldn't," he said. "You have to stay out of trouble. That's your most important job right now: you stay out of trouble for a year.
You're almost home now; only one month more to go. Then you'll have done it, the year. You can do that, you'll be free. You wont have to come in and see me anymore, which I know you don't look forward to.
Being on your own again, and we'll hafta see if we can get you not her job. So that's what you want to concentrate on. Just a little bit longer: proving that you can behave."
Janet wasn't bright but she was clever. She was playing for time.
Sooner or later he'd become tired or hungry; have to go to the bathroom; meet his next appointment; decide to go home. Then instead of it being necessary for her to plead fatigue, played-out memory, generalized confusion, or something else, anything, in order to escape, he would call it off and let her go.
Merrion had first encountered play-acting during his indoctrination as a rookie clerk working the juvenile court session under the carefully reserved supervision of Larry Lane: Brylcreemed up swept wave of hair and the heavily spiced Jade East after-shave lotion; flared trousers and the counterfeit Gucci loafers; bushy grey-black mutton-chop sideburns: Lawrence D. Lane, Clerk of the Court, acting monarch of every damned thing he surveyed. "You're only young for a while."
Larry did it with panache; he did not like training novices. "No mercy," he said, telling Merrion how to deal with beggars seeking undeserved favors or asking them on days when Merrion did not feel like granting any, even to the worthy. "For any damned reason at all, or for no reason at all. No quarter. Especially when they start in on you, giving you the old routine. They're trying to distract you. Get you to thinkin' about something else, and then actually discussin' it, talkin' about it with them, something' you weren't even thinkin' about when they came in.
"When they do that, you start saying "Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit." And you keep on sayin' it, all right? Until they get discouraged, go away, and stop trying to do it. I tell you, son, I tell you true: it's the only way."
Merrion had been politically insinuated into Lane's office as a reward for more than six years of doglike devoted service, the first two as an unpaid volunteer, in behalf of the electoral ambitions of Assistant by de facto House Majority Leader Daniel Hilliard. Roger Hulsman of Wey-mouth retained his clawlike hold on the title, the perquisites and pay, for what he had announced would be his final term thus 'laming his own fuckin' duck," as Hilliard said.
That political experience had made Merrion mistrust any tactic of dismissing a voter or disappointing a potential ally except the familiar one getting rid of the petitioner by soothingly lulling him into the hopeful but mistaken belief that if at all possible his wishes would be granted; sending him away already softened up for the gradual accretion of the understanding that he wasn't going to get what his patron had already made painfully clear was going to be extremely hard to bring about. A neutral party seeking a favor was a loyal friend in prospect. If circumstances made it necessary to reject his proposal, the prudent politician tried to do it so that he did not go away an enemy.
Lane smelled Merrion's reservation. "This isn't politics you're playing now, not while you're in here. Not when you're dealing with the scum that we have to deal with. These bastards can't do a thing for you or to you. What these bastards are's fuckin' helpless. In here you don't have to be nice, even pretend to be nice. You're official; you are real; and this's the real fuckin' world, where you are right now. They are the real people in it, the dirt off the street that's tracked in here.
"The outside where you used to be may've looked like the real world to you and Hilliard, but trust me, my friend, it was not. Out there you were dealing with other real people who wanted to be doing what they were doing, in the place where they were doing it. Sometimes it was the same thing you wanted, or Hilliard wanted, so you had to fight those other people to get it. Sometimes you beat them and sometimes they beat you, but most times either way, you could respect them.
"What you're doing in here is dealing with scum. They don't want to be in here. They don't want anything except Out, so they can go back to doing what they did want that got them hauled in here. They hate you but they respect you. You're god to them, at least for that day that they're here. But don't let it go to your head; every other day somebody else's money, somebody else's car, the booze or the white powder is their god. It's not like they're choosy. But just the same, that day when you're their god is a long one. It's the rest of their lives. That's what it looks like to them. That's as far as they can see; it's the way that they think and they live. The only way they can think, you see? Because that's the way that they live.
"They got a short attention span. A long weekend for them's as long as your whole baseball season. They think in terms of how long they've got left to be high on what they just smoked or injected or sniffed, before they have to go out and get some more money, one way or the other, to get stuff to get high again before otherwise they crash and burn. Our week is a month in their lives, and six months in the County House for these bozos's the same as the rest of their lives. It's further'n their eyes can see.
"So that's the new power you got now. It's you who decides what it's gonna be for them. Whether they live or whether they die: doesn't matter. Good reason; bad reason; no reason at all, except you got a hair 'cross your ass. All totally up to you here.
"Most of them already know. They know if they don't like what you say you will do for them or to them, even if it's nothin', they're up shit creek. Nowhere else to go. Your bad mood is their tough shit. Any place else they go, over your head, upstairs: if they get anything at all they'll get less, or else so damned much more that when they leave this place they'll wish they'd known enough just to've stopped at you.
"You're thinkin': "What if one of these bozos gets mad, what if he gets really mad? What if he goes to his rep, to my rabbi? What'll happen to me if he does?"
"I'll tell you what happens then, he tries to pull any that shit," Lane said. "Not one fuckin' thing's what happens. Not one fuckin' thing.
Because you know what? There'll come a day, this year or next, when His rep or your rabbi's gonna need a big favor, and this'll be the only place in the whole fuckin' world he can get that favor done. His kid takes a bust or his wife's drivin' under; some guy he owes big takes a collar for asking' a lady cop in plain clothes if she'd like to give him a blow-job. Lemme tell you something', pal: When that day comes that this guy's rep or your rabbi has to make that phone call, here, to get it straightened out as he knows it will he doesn't want havin' you remember how he stuck it up your ass when some shit bird-civilian complained. As he knows you will if he ever does.
"He didn't put you in here so that you'd get mad at him, and then when he needed something, get even tell him to go fuck himself. He put you in here so that some day when he absolutely has to get a favor done, you'll remember him kindly and be grateful to him for that thing he did for you, so long ago.
"So, when the scumbag, any scumbag, goes and gripes to his rep about you, your rabbi wont do a damned thing to you; that's what he'll do.
Why you think it is that the guys like Brother Hilliard put their friends in here? You ever think about that? It's because they know what we find out, just as soon's we get in here: We become bulletproof.
Bulletproof even from them. In this job, we're immortal. If you're smart you only want your friends to be immortal, and to stay your friends after they do.
"Now, with the shit birds that don't know this, you might as well teach 'em. Sooner they find out, the better. The way we do things in this place. We have to get rid of some bastard, which we have to do every day, well, that's what we do: We get rid of 'em, fast as we can.
Sometimes we make mistakes, but that's all right. We back each other up. All the way up, and then back down the line. We make it stick.
That way the thing works for us, instead of us workin' for it."
Merrion had never uttered Lane's mantra, but he had applied the tactic, furtively at first; time and time again he had seen it work. It always worked.
He looked at his watch. It was coming up on 10:00 A.M." forty-five minutes to his regular tee-time at Grey Hills. Janet had taken enough of his morning. Saturday was his day off. He cleared his throat.
"Right," he said. "Well, there I can't help you. Help you get along with the other tenants. I don't run the building. You got a complaint there, you see Mister Brody. If he can, I'm sure he'll help you out.
But that's not why I wanted you in here.
"The reason you're here is you're seeing a man name of Lowell Chappelle, and letting him stay overnight." She opened her mouth and he held up his hand. "Don't even bother," he said on a rising inflection. "I wont tell you who told me, I don't have to tell you, and I'm not going to tell you. If you try to tell me it isn't true, I'll call you a liar, which you will be. And it will upset me, Janet, if I find I have to do that. You haven't lied to me yet, that I know about and if you ask around, people will tell you: I always know, when somebody tries to lie to me as I didn't think that you would when I gave you a break. That's the reason why I've been able to try to help you out a little. Because I know you've always told me the truth. Just like I've always told you the truth. So, when I tell you that something about you's started to disturb me, as I'm telling you something is now, you know I'm telling the truth.
"What's disturbing me is that what I hear's been going on in your life is not good. It's a very bad thing in fact, what I hear, and I know very well that it's true. So, since the only thing that you can really say to me is that it's not true, and that will be a lie, which would be a very bad mistake, the best thing you can do right now is just shut up and listen to me."
She closed her mouth and looked scared.
"Good," he said, 'that's much better. Mister Chappelle is a convicted felon. Mister Chappelle's been convicted seven times. I've been around long enough to know what went on when he got sentenced. The first two or three times he was young and looked scared, just like you're looking right now, so the judges went easy on him. They were in hopes that he'd mend his ways. He didn't. So the judges started giving him time, in the hope that might straighten him out. His third or fourth trip on the merry-go-round, he got two years and did one. But that didn't do the trick either. Apparently he still wasn't convinced that the lawful life's the best one.
"When he came out, he stayed out for less'n two years, probably not being good, but being careful or lucky. Doing bad things but not getting caught. Probably went to his head; maybe made him a little bit cocky. Alas and alack, his good luck ran out as good luck has a way of doing. He slipped up and he got caught again, did another bad thing someone could prove.
"So this was his fifth trip, let's say. He still got off easy, considering his history. The judge gave him five in the jar. He came out after he'd done three, still having learned very little. People're starting to think: "He's had all these chances, all this instruction; and still he doesn't behave. Maybe he's not a good kid. Less'n a year and he's back in the gravy. Gets ten-to-twelve and does most of the ten.
"So when he came out, his next-to-last trip, he'd been in the courts on six offenses fourteen years in the slammer. Even allowing for the fact that he got an early start he was seventeen, he first made himself known to the authorities after six convictions for doing bad stuff, he's no longer an innocent kid. He'd used up his slack. So when he got grabbed the seventh time, and he had a machine gun with him, people were convinced he was a bad actor, very bad boy indeed.
"So they said to him: "Okay, Mister Chappelle, now we get the idea. You don't seem to get the idea. Here's your program: Twenty years to be served, FCI McNeil Island, 'way out there in Washington State. This time you're doing hard time."
"This gentleman caller of yours, Miss LeClerc: Leaving aside the obvious fact that at age fifty-seven he's kind of old for you, twice your age, he is not the kind of fellow we like to see refined young ladies under our care and supervision hanging out with all the time. Much less shacked up with in respectable apartment buildings we got them into, and which we've been paying the rent on. So we want you to break it off with him. As of now, this very minute, Mister Chappell is off-limits to you."
"But I like him," she whined, pouting her lower lip. "I'm a normal woman, and I need a man, and he always treats me real good." She paused and pouted, lowering her head so that when she looked at Merrion she had to look through her eyelashes. "I like doing things for him," she said, 'and he likes having me do them. He says that's the only reason he's ever had any trouble with a woman, was because she wouldn't do the things he wanted her to do. But I like to do them, and so therefore we're fine."
Merrion sighed and stood up. "Uh uh," he said, "I don't care to hear it. You've got the word. I just gave it to you. Quit entertaining Chappelle at your place, and don't see him any other place, either. You do, and I'll hear about it, and when I do, I'll do something about it.
Furthermore, I will do it to you.
"You wont like it. The first thing I'll do, I'll pull your case out of the file which I can do since I'm the one who put it in there and I will tell the judge what you've been doing. Screwing Lowell Chappelle, a bad actor and known felon. Not at all the kind of person we want hanging around with defendants who've got cases on file here in this court. This to Judge Cavanaugh will mean the same thing it means to me: that the deal we made -I would place your case on file; you'd behave yourself and do as you're told that deal isn't working out.
"I know what the judge'll do, just in case you don't. What he'll do is tell me to take your case out of the file and mark it up for hearing, any old day I like, and that's exactly what I'll do. Then, come next weekend, I'll send a couple of cops and a matron over to your place and catch you flopping around in bed with Mister Chappelle, as you've been told not to do. They'll put you in the lock-up for the rest of the weekend.
"On Monday the judge'll have me call your case, and before you can so much as catch your breath and call me even one bad name, he'll make a finding of guilty on that old charge of grand larceny. To which, you'll remember, you've already admitted facts sufficient to prove guilt. And then he will send you to jail. You'll do a year down in MCI Framingham, Janet, okay? Mister Chappelle wont be on your list of approved visitors, just like he isn't out here any more, now that we've had our nice little chat, but you'll hardly notice.
"There'll be so many other things for you to dislike, you'll probably forget all about Lowell. You'll lose your nice little apartment we wont keep it vacant for you, while you're gone, and we wont get you a new one when you get out again. You wont have any privacy, or your freedom to do what you like, as little as that has been. No indeed, Janet, once you get down there, all day long you'll do just as you're told. And you'll be told plenty, my dear. Now, is that what you want me to do?"
She looked at the floor and shook her head No. "Aloud," Merrion said, 'answer me."
She looked up with fear and shook her head again. "No," she said, 'please don't do that to me."
"I don't want to," he said, making statements. "But I will, if you make me. You know that. You wont make me now, will you, Janet?"
"No, I wont," Janet said. "I'll be good."
Three-eighths of a mile back from Route 9, facing southwest at the foot of Mount Wolf in Cumberland, the pale grey three-story clubhouse at Grey Hills that Saturday morning stood impeccably white-shuttered in green August shade, the lofty old maples and oaks flanking the drive bowing and rustling in a variable northwest breeze. Jesse Grey had started the sixteen-month process of building it in 1896 as the thirty-six room manor house and centerpiece of his 332-acre estate, suitable for the new life as a country gentleman he had in mind to crown his success in the paper-milling business on the Connecticut River.
"Success that came right out of the hides of the poor devils working for him. Drove his people unmercifully, full double-shifts, sixteen hours a day in the mill, five and a half days a week. For twenty or thirty cents a day," Larry Lane said, recalling Grey with dutiful second-hand malice. "They tended to die young one of 'em was an uncle of mine, Uncle Eddie; was dead before I was born. Before they got to be twenty-five. Bastards like Jesse just worked them to death. What did they care? When the morning came someone didn't show up, or did but collapsed on the job, Jesse had 'em waiting in line to replace him.
"No one around here at the time really knew the whole extent of what Grey'd had done up there, woods he'd had cut down and the pasture he'd had turned into lawns," Lane said. "He brought in all his own foremen from outside. He hired local labor to improve Wolf River and the South Brook for trout fishing, make them run faster with deeper pools; clear the brush and put up the fences, white board like you see on TV, the horse farms in Kentucky on Derby Day; lay out the bridle paths and build the tennis courts and pool. The house and barns and stable; the quarter-mile exercise track.
But all anyone really knew enough to speak of was the part of the job that he did; that the bathrooms were all Italian marble; the size of the big crystal chandeliers. They knew it was grand and elegant, sure, but just how grand and how swell didn't come out 'til years later.
"Then when it did almost no one was interested. One of those WPA writers FDR put to work in the Depression went back and dug up the history of the old place, to go with some pictures they had taken of it for a book about the valley. They put copies in all the libraries around here. For all the good that did; nobody read the damned thing.
Well, I did, but you never could go by what I did. Nobody else ever read it.
"What this WPA guy did was track down the ledgers with the accounts of the money Grey'd sunk into that place. It came to about nine hundred thousand dollars and this was at the turn of the century. Be eight or ten million today."
Thirty-five years later, two years into the Depression, Grey's heirs had found themselves too short of money to maintain the estate, and had been forced to put it up for sale. Lane had seen it as it was then.
"Still used to go and fish there. The fact the place was all neglected didn't mean the trout'd all packed up and gone away, or that Grey and his fine fancy friend's caught all of them before they faded away themselves. What'd always been there was still there; you could catch a nice fat two-or three-pound rainbow, or a good-sized brown down by the Ox Bow. The streams were still okay; just the place'd gone to hell."
Lane had not been exaggerating. The photographs that the auctioneer had commissioned in the mid-Thirties for use in the brochure to advertise the property to potential bidders far away without success, as it turned out were on display in the card-room of the Grey Hills clubhouse. The sepia-toned eight-by-ten glossies showed the rolling lawns overgrown; the gardens gone to seed. The two-by-fours that had tautly. framed the block-U-shaped chicken-wire enclosures at the ends of the two clay tennis courts had fallen down. Six deep slatted wooden lawn-chairs with arms broad enough to serve as trays stood bleached and rotten by the courts, four abandoned at odd angles along the sidelines of one, the others together near the westerly baseline of the second.
Merrion imagined their occupants in better days rising slowly with tennis sweaters draped over their shoulders, the men in long white flannel pants, the women in long white tennis dresses going away from the chairs and up across the lawn toward the great house, the windows lighted golden in the blue twilight of some early autumn Sunday evening, '28, or '29, the future growing dark and closing in around them, the carefree people innocent, unaware it was one of the last weekend gatherings they would have together there, a rich contented family, with wealthy handsome friends.
In the old photographs weeds had reclaimed the playing surfaces. The buildings still barely standing then were dilapidated, all their window-glass long since shot out, needing much more than paint. The mews off behind the northeast corner of the house, where the pro shop now stood, had burned in lightning-started fires in the spring of 1930.
They had never been rebuilt; in the pictures two charred vertical beams stood in the rubble. Most of the tiles a watercolor done by some Grey family guest showed them to have been azure had fallen into the vast swimming pool, exposing the white mastic that had dried on the cement underneath. The beams and the shingled roof of the four-room cabana and verandah lay collapsed on the edge of the apron on the southerly side. The house had tilted off at a slight angle to the east, its three massive chimneys leaning toward the center of its sagging rooftree, by then almost buckled. The barn, since demolished, in the photograph retained the double doors, large and small, up and down, each of them securely latched when Herbert Hoover was still in the White House, claiming to see better days just ahead for the nation. But the auctioneer's photographer had set up his view camera to take the picture from dead center at the front; Mount Wolf was clearly visible behind it through the gaps in its siding.
"The wonder was that all of it hadn't been torched, right to the ground," Lane said. "Only reason it wasn't was because by the time Grey's heirs sold it, they were just as down-and-out as everybody else.
Not worth envying and hating any more. Besides, hardly anyone still alive by then ever knew them. Few oldtimers who were still around who hated Jesse couldn't do much to hurt him; he was long and safely dead. Got himself thrown by a horse, I recall, before FDR came in. You could call Jesse lots of names, but you couldn't fault his timing, came to knowing when to clear out.
"Anyway," Larry Lane said, 'at that point taking pictures of it was a total waste of time, no matter if it was the WPA was throwing away taxpayers' money to make a book no one'd read or the auction house trying to see if they could scare up a buyer someplace in the world.
They couldn't. The whole shebang was worthless, likely to stay that way. We look back now at the Depression and we nod to each other and say how bad it must've been then; took a world-war-economy boom to get us out of it, ten, eleven years of hopelessness and then five, six more of being afraid no matter what the president said. But from here we can see that it come to an end. From there, the point of view of people living through it, out of work, no money to buy food, it looked different, like it'd never end.
"That's why Jesse Grey's estate was worthless; not because it wasn't still beautiful property but because no one had any money to buy it. So no matter what it'd cost to build it and equip it, it was worth nothing. And hopeless because there's no hope in this goddamned world for any one or any thing that isn't worth some kind of money.
"So, since it looked hopeless, just as you would've expected, if you'd thought about it at all, the Catholic fucking Church bought it. For chump change, of course, its usual price. What it generally pays if it doesn't get what it wants as a gift, absolutely for free. A hundred-ten-thousand dollars, all told, dirt-cheap even back then. Back taxes, of course, and about sixty grand in bank notes some overconfident Grey or other'd borrowed from some unusually stupid banker when the family fortune'd started to melt away meeting margin calls, month or so after the Crash. One cockeyed optimist going deeper into debt with another one, still convinced the rich kid's playground could be saved.
"A hundred-and-ten-thousand dollars. For three-hundred-and-thirty-two acres of prime land. Three-hundred-and-some bucks an acre. Bad news for the Grey family, of course, already up to its hips in bad news, but bad news too for the town of Cumberland, which didn't need any more either. That was the single most valuable parcel of property in the whole town, and just like that, it was off the assessment rolls, no longer a taxable asset. Even if and when the economy came back, as of course it did, that property wasn't going to be any use to anyone unless they had enough bucks not just to buy it but then spend rebuilding it. No one could afford to let an investment that big sit idle unless you count the Catholic Church.
"God bless the Roman Catholic Church," Larry Lane many times said, always seeming to marvel, laughing and shaking his head, as though he really had been at once utterly baffled and completely amused. "As surely He must've, a great many times, to explain what it's gotten away with. Year after year; decade after decade; the century after the centuries before, the Catholic Church marches on.
"The bishop in the Thirties here McLaughlin was his name, that much I am sure of; Francis McLaughlin, I think apparently shared the predominant view of the men who run his church that a bishop can't have too much land. Or too many buildings, as far as that goes, even if they're all fallin' down. So when Jesse's remaining heirs or their lawyers, I dunno, whoever all those people were down in Phil-la-dci-phy-ay when they put his great estate up for sale here, the only bidder in sight was the diocese of Springfield.
One-hundred-and-ten-thousand American dollars. I've got no idea how or where his sacredness came up with the money. He never confided in me.
Or what on earth he planned to do with the ramshackle place. Most people thought he didn't, either. Just get it first, and then, bye and bye, think about what you're gonna do with it. You've got plenty of time. "Forever's a very long time'; that's the way the people think in Holy Mother Church. They've got the keys to forever."
In 1948 eighteen wealthy men of the Pioneer Valley formed a real estate trust and negotiated the purchase of the property from the diocese. The deed recited that price for the transfer of the property to the Grey Hills Association, a non-profit organization newly-established by documents drawn up by one of their leaders, Warren Corey, of Butler amp;. Corey, was 'one dollar and other valuable consideration, receipt of which is hereby acknowledged." The actual price was not disclosed. "Three-hundred-odd-thousand was the price you heard quoted," Lane said, 'just under a thousand an acre. But no one outside the deal knew."
The architects the association hired to plan and oversee the beginnings of the four-year transformation shrewdly laid out the property so that the par 71, 7,241-yard championship golf course, designed by Robert Trent Jones, formed a natural tiara for the mansion. The country club opened in 1952, 'reinventing serenity in the beautiful valley of the Connecticut River," Life said the following year in an October feature issue entitled "Life Goes to New England in the Fall."
The architects and engineers curved the main entrance drive slightly, to preserve as many as possible of the tall oaks and broad maples forming a canopy over it, bordering the approach with low stone walls broken here and there for footpaths. Visitors approached the clubhouse among the undulating fairways and deceptively-beckoning greens of the most spectacular seven of the eighteen showcase holes, crossing the slightly arched stone bridge over South Brook into the circular drive at the main entrance hedged all around with rose, rhododendron, and lilac bushes.
A hexagonal brass lantern six feet long and two feet wide hung on a black chain under the porte cochere; except during high winds or snow-storms, an assistant steward brought a twelve-foot wooden stepladder from the equipment shack each Friday morning, set it up in front of the dark red front door and polished the lantern. Eight years away from celebration of its 50th anniversary season, what one columnist for Golf had called 'the crown jewel links of western New England' to the considerable displeasure of notable members of several other equally exclusive clubs between Worcester and Albany Grey Hills that August Saturday made the gritty vision of Janet LeClerc vanish from Merrion's mind like a dragon imagined in a cloud changing shape in the wind. He thought that if working Saturday morning meant you could drive your Eldorado down Valley Drive into Grey Hills and spend the rest of the day playing eighteen holes of golf and having lunch with your friend Danny Hilliard, only a fool would sleep late.
The brilliant white fine sand filling the traps was renewed every spring, trucked in from Eastham on the elbow of Cape Cod.
Forty-two-hundred-dollar annual fees, rumored soon to be increased, six hundred dollars more, from three hundred and twenty-five members, covered that. In the summer the grass remained soft, emerald-jersey green, pampered early mornings and evenings with water from the cold streams Grey's laborers had improved, and whenever Merrion went there, he remembered what Dan Hilliard had said back in 1992 as they drank Dom Perignon to celebrate their twenty years of membership: "It doesn't matter who you are, where you've been or what you've done, or how many times you've been here: Every time that you come back, drive down Valley Drive in the shade of those venerable trees; see the sunlight making the dew silver in the morning; feel the cool breeze slipping down from the hills in the summer; or smell the maple burning in the fireplace in the fall, that same sweet lovely hush still welcomes you.
You can almost hear it whispering: "Peace now, the struggle's interrupted. You've come; you're here; everything's all right again."
"I know you're always telling me I just don't understand what being members at Grey Hills means to you and Dan," Diane said the next morning, to welling her hair as she emerged from her shower, 'but if that champagne toast he made last night wasn't the corniest thing I ever heard in my life, it's sure got to be well-up-there in the running."
"It's simple," Merrion said, baring his teeth for inspection in the mirror, "Grey Hills is the only thing we've ever gotten, from doing what we've done all our lives, that was strictly for us, our reward.
From the very beginning, everything that Danny's ever done in public life; everything that I've done, first when I was helping him run for office and then at the courthouse, has always been primarily for someone else's good. At least one somebody else; in Danny's case, down in the House, for all the people in his district, what he's thought would be best for them, his constituents. In my case, what would be the best thing to do in a given case that would make Cumberland or Hampton Falls or Hampton Pond or Canterbury a better place to live, either by helping to make sure that someone who's done something bad in one of the towns, violated social order, gets punished for it so that he or she maybe wont do it again and also so that someone else who sees how they got punished for doing it wont do that same thing himself."
"Yes," she said, drying under her breasts, 'and if I'm not mistaken, you're both fairly well paid for your valuable services, and also get health-care and retirement plans."
"Indeed we do," Merrion said. "We were never rich men. We'd've been awful fools to've done it for nothing." He turned away from the mirror. She stepped away from the tub enclosure to make way for him, bending at the same time to dry her legs, and he patted her on the left buttock. "Nice ass," he said, 'very nice ass."
"Animal," she said, straightening up and out of his reach, 'sanctimonious do-gooder, claiming virtue for making a living."
"Anyone else in my job or Danny's would've gotten the same money we do," he said, one foot in the tub. "But they might not've filled them like we have. That's where the virtue is: it's in how we've done those jobs. We really do think of them as public trusts. We really do work to make sure we deserve that trust. I know it sounds like campaign bullshit, but it's the truth."
He took his foot out of the tub and stood contemplating her in her nakedness, glad explaining and pretending he was trying to convince her was giving him the excuse. "Grey Hills is the indulgence we've permitted ourselves to get from doing that work. It's the only thing we've ever gotten that we said from the beginning we wanted purely for us. Knowing of course that wed never really get it; as Danny said last night: "No question about it it was totally presumptuous of us to even think it, think some day we might get in."
This's one of the finest golf clubs in the world. For us to imagine wed ever become members was silly. It was like some high-school second baseman making his league all-star team and thinking now he's got it wired, he is definitely on his way to the major leagues and a Hall of Fame career ending up in Cooperstown: a kid's golden dream and nothing more.
"And then son of a gun, we got in.
"In a way we still can't believe that we did it. When we were young men it looked way out of reach. We couldn't afford it, and not only that, if wed had the money and tried to get in, they wouldn't've let us we weren't well-bred enough for that bunch. So it was always something beyond our wildest dreams. And then all of a sudden, the planets align and we're in. There's only one possible explanation for this: it's what we got for being good men."
He was tumescent and stepped back from the shower, starting toward her.
She backed away holding the towel out in her left hand at arm's length and grabbing the other end with her right as though intending to snap him with it. She said smiling: "No, no, Simba, not playtime now; time to wash. Coffee first. Back off and get yourself into that shower.
Tell yourself what a grand public servant you are while you're getting yourself clean. I've had enough of your pious guff."
"The thing men always have to remember about women," he said as though talking to himself, stepping into the shower, 'is the ones who're sexy lack soul."
On a gray Saturday in Holyoke in the early spring of 1966, Dan Hilhard in his High Street office had invited Merrion to tell him what he wanted, nodding approvingly as he listened. "Uh-huh," Hilliard'd said, 'that would make a lot of sense, wouldn't it. Grab that clerkship for you now, while nobody's really mad at us. Oughta go through like grease through a goose. And it would too, if it weren't for just one thing, just one minor problem, standing between you and that job. Larry Lane. He has to clear it through Chassy, but he's the guy who appoints."
"I don't even know him," Merrion'd said. "I don't even know who he is."
"I know that," Hilliard'd said, "I realize that. That's a big part of this minor problem."
Early in the spring of 1966, the second year of his third term in the House, State Rep. Daniel Hilliard, D." Holyoke, perceived that Merrion was getting restless serving as his chief assistant. Merrion was twenty-five. Hilliard, having turned thirty the year before, realized that Merrion's itchiness was appropriate.
He had logged more than six years in Hilliard's service. During the first two, unpaid, he had tailored his selection of courses and arranged his class schedules at UMass. to fit the demands of Hilliard's successful campaign in 1960 for a seat on the Holyoke Board of Aldermen. In '62, he had given up his part-time job at Valley Ford and the assurance of a full-time position after he graduated; the idea didn't thrill him in order to manage Hilliard's legislative candidacies and help him to deal with the responsibilities his victories imposed.
"The fact is," Hilliard said to his wife, Mercy during childhood her younger sister's approximation of "Marcy' had become her family's name of choice 'he's put his own life on Hold. He's subordinated his interests to mine for a very long time."
"And it's worked like a charm," Mercy said. She tried always to see clearly and be just. Where Merrion was concerned, that took effort.
Some of his ideas and a good deal of his behaviour troubled her. For all his ferocious loyalty to Danny and hard work in his behalf, he was not the kind of decent, sober, principled man she would have chosen to be her husband's highly-influential right-hand man if she'd been consulted about it.
"The reason it has is precisely because we are so close and work so well together," Hilliard said.
"You're telling me," Mercy said. "If it weren't for me and the kids, most people'd assume the two of you're a pair of queers. As it is only some of them do."
"They must not know about Sunny," he said.
"Or if they do," Mercy said, 'they don't know enough. With her clothes on she looks like a respectable woman."
"Meow," Hilliard said.
Mercy smiled demurely. "Just stating the facts," she said.
The Hilliard-Merrion partnership began on a snowy afternoon of the second Friday in January of 1959, at the counter in the parts and service department of Valley Ford at the corner of Lower Westfteld and Holyoke Streets in Holyoke. Hilliard had come to pick up his black '56 two-door Victoria hardtop, having left it that morning to be serviced.
"The two of us already sort of knew each other some," Merrion said later to curious people who'd seen them in action. Hilliard used his car a lot, which brought him often to the counter at the window in the service department where Merrion sat on his four-legged metal stool, the grey steel shelves of boxed small parts behind him. "You couldn't say that we were buddies. We'd never had a beer. But we weren't total strangers when I first went to work for Dan."
Hilliard had bought his car from Merrion's father. Pat Merrion had worked for twelve years as a salesman for John Casey, the last seven as sales manager, until his first stroke killed him as he would have wished but not so early at the age of forty-nine in February of the previous year, his oldest son's first year at UMass. Patrick Merrion's father, Seamus, had died at seventy-three in 1940, suffering his third and fatal stroke two years after his first. Pat, starting a new job at the Springfield Armory with a young wife and a new baby, Ambrose, at home, had also had to help his mother take care of Seamus. From that he had learned something he passed on to Ambrose. "If you're determined to die of a stroke, do your best to die of the first one.
Make it easier on your poor family."
John Casey did what he could to help out Pat's family, and it was a lot. Remembering, Merrion said to Casey's widow at his wake: "It was different in those days. People took care of each other. Their code was different. You looked out for your family and friends. They were all you had in the world. The same way you were all that they had."
The younger boy, Chris, was ten when his father dropped dead. His mother, Polly, hadn't held a job since she stopped being a sales clerk at the Forbes amp;. Wallace department store in Springfield to get married in a hurry in 1939. Casey had doubled the vacation pay Pat had accumulated; that was half of the $1,800 Bill Reed charged Polly for Pat's three-thousand-dollar funeral. "Pat was always a favorite of mine," Reed told her. "If Ford made hearses and flower-cars, mine'd be Fords I bought from Pat." Casey had expedited payment of the five-thousand-dollar group life-insurance policy Valley carried on each of its employees, close to two years' salary for a sales manager in those days. Mindful that base pay had represented less than half of Pat Merrion's average earnings and dead men earn few commissions and that a widow with a child at home could depend on less than $1,000 in Social Security benefits, Casey had also created the job for Amby as assistant service manager: twenty hours a week at $3.50 an hour.
"All I could work and stay in school at the same time, like my mother wanted. And health insurance for the three of us, too -we were very grateful for that," Merrion said to Casey's widow in the fall of 1990.
"Your husband was a good man, Jo, a fine man. Everyone who knew him thought the world of John. He cared about what happened to the people who worked for him. He treated us as friends, not employees, and we've all lost one tonight."
In those days the normal service interval between oil changes and lube jobs was every fifteen hundred miles. Hilliard was a careful owner.
Mernon saw him frequently. "This car's gotta outlive the payments.
Oil's a lot cheaper'n new rings and valves," Hilliard would say, every three weeks or so, writing a check for twenty-eight dollars and change for Marfak chassis lubrication, a new Motorcraft oil filter, and six quarts of crankcase oil as Amby stamped another service order PAID and punched the register.
"They'd love you in Texas," Merrion said that winter day, having seen a Transcript column about the coming election that low-rated Hilliard's chances. "You oughta go down there and run. If they only knew who you are, how much oil we got you buying from them, you wouldn't have to bother with alderman here they'd make you the governor."
"Hey, what can I tell you?" Hilliard said. "The political bug is expensive. You run for office, you're out every night in your car. You gotta be; people expect it. Depend on a car like that, go through two sets of tires a year, you gotta take care of the thing. You better; otherwise some dark night you get stranded. Hafta walk home in the rain."
"How's that thing look, anyway?" Merrion said, ringing up the payment and lifting the change tray out of the register to put the check in the empty drawer underneath it. It had been a quiet day, the weather keeping the customers away.
"Danny came in one day when I was bored out of my mind," Merrion would say to people impressed with the depth of their friendship. "I also was lonesome. No one to play with. The salesmen're all out in the front of the store; mechanics out back in the shop. They had each other to talk to. Also all had their own things to do. I was all by myself, without either. Only people I had to talk to onna job were the customers; that's how I come to know Danny.
"It's snowing: no customers. Everyone headed home early from work. I'm there by myself. Phone isn't ringing. I already finished the papers.
Didn't have any my books with me; normal day, no time to study. No radio. And anyways, Friday afternoon in January: wasn't any game on.
So I got nothing to do. Except now I got Danny. Naturally I don't want him to leave. Knew him well enough to know if I can just get him goin', he may not know it yet but he's gonna entertain me.
"That's an important thing, having someone else around you can talk to.
People take it for granted, don't understand how important it can be until it's gone. My father died, I'd just started at UMass." but I wasn't going there because Harvard turned me down. I was going there because that was all my parents could afford. I was still living at home.
"So now he's dead. My little brother Chris's only ten and anyway, he's in school all day. My mother didn't have a job then. She's at home all by herself, like she always was, but now things're different. In a big way they are different. Nothin' to look forward to all day now anymore. My father comin' home at night: that'd been her big event.
Hadn't been that big a deal for me and Chris. Lots of other people alia around us alia time. School all day; inna summer we're out playin' ball an' so forth. Goin' swimming. All that stuff, onna weekend with our friends. Didn't think about Dad comin' home at night like she did but after he was dead, we did.
"My father loved to talk. "Talk your ear off if you let him," people used to say about him. "On any day I got nothin' to do; I'm just sorta killin' time, you know?" John Casey used to say, "those're the days I'm glad I got Pat. Never a dull day with Pat. Busy days, I'm still glad we got him. He's a large part of what makes our business successful valuable employee. Best salesman we got, which's why he's the manager.
'"But say it's a brutally hot afternoon, July or August; nobody's around. You're open but you know: no one's ever comin' in. They're all at the beach, Mountain Park, on vacation. No one in the world's buyin' cars. We're all fallin' asleep at our desks.
' "That is a day when I'm glad we got Pat on the payroll. All I got do to get through a slow day like that not makin' any money; can at least have a good time is go down in the salesroom. Pull up a chair beside Pat's desk and say: "Well, Pat, whatcha think's goin' on?" Anna next thing I know, my sides ache from laughin'. I mean it: they literally hurt and it's time to close up for the night.
'"I'd rather all the days're busy, naturally I wouldn't think of interrupting him. After all, havin' laughs ain't what we're in business for. Pat was on one of his patented rolls, there, he'd get onto sometimes, he'd have four sold by two the afternoon, when he'd finally break for lunch. And then two hours later, when he finally came back he did not like to hurry his lunch he'd have another prospect he picked up in the bar at Henry's Grist Mill. By five he'd have him sold five inna day.
'"All you hadda do with Pat was leave the guy alone. When he was on a hot run, all you could see was smoke. So, it's more'n his talk that we're gonna miss; we're all sure gonna miss the man too."
"He'd come home," Merrion would say, 'and wed have dinner and he'd tell us what he did. Who came in the dealership. What they had to say about what was going on. Talk and talk and talk. And most of what he talked about I thought about it quite a bit since then, when he died wasn't cars at all. Or baseball; wasn't golf. I don't think he ever played golf; don't think it ever crossed his mind. Basketball or football, anything like that; it was politics. When he picked the subject, as he could, at home, he picked politics.
"He knew about sports. He kept up with the games and the standings and so forth so he could talk about them if that's what his customer had on his mind. He read quite a bit too -Saturday Post. Collier's. Life.
Time 'nd Sports Illustrated. Reader's and Catholic Digest. Belonged the Reader's Digest book club. Every month unless you sent the card back, you got three or four books in one. Said he wished he could sell cars like that, send a card to people sayin' "You don't mail this back to me, two weeks from today, you' ll bought a brand-new car." They were mostly for my mother, but he generally tried to read at least one of them. Few of his customers taught up the road; hadda to talk to them too.
"He considered it part of his job, keeping the customers happy. You asked him how come he was so good at doing what he did, he made no secret of it: "The guy who buys a car from me today for the first time did not become my customer today. He became my customer three years ago, four years ago, whenever I first met him. Outside of church; having a few drinks. Rotary; Kiwanis; communion breakfast; town-committee meeting. Somebody's wake." Dad belonged to all the service clubs, went to all the wakes and breakfasts. But the one he liked the best was Democratic town committee. He always said he was glad he wasn't sellin' Cadillacs, "because then I would have to be on the Republican committee." Always hadda sense of humor.
'"That customer of mine didn't get to know me back then when he first did because he thought he might want to buy a Ford some day and I'be a good man to know. He bought the Ford from me today because he's gotten to know me as a man uses people all right doing business with them. So when he decided he needed a new car last night or the night before, he also decided he might as well come in and see me, and "maybe buy a Ford from Pat. Might as well, the price is right. Never put any pressure on me; always liked the guy for that." Really as simple as that."
"He was always schmoozing people, not that he called it that. Their pal who talked baseball with them or fishing, whatever they liked. But what he almost always talked about at home was politics, and then he died.
"At night after me and Chris and my mother got through having dinner, Chris'd go off to do his homework, watch TV or something 'til he hadda go to bed. And I'd be still sittin' there, at the kitchen table talkin' with her. What I should've been doing was studying. School wasn't easy for me. I was never what you'd've called a scholar, and with my job working for John Casey, and then on Danny's campaigns on top of that, I hadda lot on my mind. I should've been hittin' the books. But instead I am sittin' there, still in the kitchen, the this and the that, talking about what'd happened to us, my father dying like that.
"Not that we ever got anywhere, my mother and I, we had all those talks. Always the same thing, over and over again. What wed done, to get through it; what we could've done instead of that, and whether that might've been better. Then what we thought we were gonna do next. It never changed. It didn't because it didn't have to. What we were doing was hangin' on there to each other, tryin' to get our heads straight. I was really worried about her.
"I remember saying to her one night someone else'd dropped dead, someone else we knew; wed just come from the wake; I've forgotten now who it was. She just seemed so blue, really down. She really had me worried. So I said to her: "He;y, look now, you, just in case you forgot: This dyin' business's a very bad habit. They say once you've got it, it's very hard to get over it. And the fact a lot of people that you really like, admire, and never expect to see them fall into it like Dad did, that doesn't make it any better. So I hope you're not thinkin' you might take it up. Me and Chris wouldn't like that at all."
"None of it was easy. Then I didn't really think about it, but since then I've thought about it very, many times. The reason she was so glad to get her job at Slade's Bakery in the center, where the Video Image Store's now? She'd been pining. The job wasn't anything big; just working at the counter there, saying Hello, asking the people that came in what they had in mind that day. Putting up boxes of whatever they asked for. Brownies; eclairs; date squares; jelly doughnuts; cookies and cup-cakes; custard pies. Putting the bread through the sheer. All of that stuff. Everyone liked Mister Slade's custard pies, and he really made excellent bread. So he had a lot of business. That meant a lot of people coming in for Polly to wait on, pass the time of day with. Help her keep up with what was going on, make her feel like she's back in the world.
"That job did wonders for her. I think about that every time I hear somebody say there's such a thing as "natural adjusted rate inflation-unemployment," or "structural unemployment." That there's always gonna be five or six percent of the work force with no jobs.
Nothin' the government can do about it. It's something can't be helped. Well bullshit; that's what I say. "Find something the poor bastards can do." Government has got to deal with it. That's what the government's for. It's a moral obligation, and I mean that. It's not just havin' no money that drags people down; it's feelin' like they don't matter, don't count any more. They lost the parts they had to play.
"I saw that with my mother. It was having that job that mattered to her. The sixty bucks a week she got: she found a way to use it, sure; it didn't go to waste. But basically the dough was gravy. That job kept her alive.
"After that it got a lot better at home, havin' dinner the nights I was there. The food wasn't as good 'cause she didn't have time to cook like she did when she was home all the time. And also, workin' in the bakery around food all day, she wouldn't be that hungry at night. But she'd bring home different things for dessert every night, and it was a lot better for her. You could see it. She was much happier. She had human contact again.
"You got to have that. We're natural herding animals. We're not supposed to be alone all the time, and when we are for too long, we don't like it. Don't handle it well. I think if you don't have that basic human contact, sooner or later you die.
"Anyway, that day Danny came in to pick up his car, I figured if I heckled him enough, he might hang around and entertain me. You get a guy who wants to be a politician like that, he's at your command. You even hint that you got something you'd like to talk about with him, bang, like that, you own him. His life is making people like him so they'll vote for him. Salesman like my father, only he's selling himself.
"He doesn't say he's doing that when he starts to talk to you. That would make you back away, think: "This guy's got something wrong with him. Don't wanna get too close." No, what he says is that if he gets elected he can do something for you you'll have a better life. If he's good, he convinces you. You and a whole bunch of other people vote for him because he's made you think he can improve your life. All he needs to know is what you need, so he can then make the noises you will think mean that if you vote for him he'll get it for you.
"Of course by the time he gets through he's gonna have to promise a hell of a lot. Which means he's gonna have to be pretty nimble later on, it comes time explain to people in the next campaign how come they didn't get exactly what he said they would when they first elected him.
But that's only if they remember. Most of them don't unless the guy running against you reminds them. But even then, by the time they get to the polls they' ll probably forgotten the reminder. People don't forgive, matter what they say. But they do forget. Their attention span is short.
"That snowy day I figured if I heckled Danny enough I could get a few laughs out of him. My own dear mother, those nights we spent talking: she was always telling me I was a fresh kid; saying if I didn't watch it, some day somebody was gonna get sore, haul off and pop me one. All my friends'd too, same thing. You got a talent, you use it. So I shoved the stick in his cage and started pokin' him around, makin' trouble."
Hilliard shrugged. "It's still awful early," he said. "The only people thinkin' about elections this time of year 're the people runnin' in them. No one else's interested. They wont be 'til a month before. Then they'll all start lookin' at the candidates, decide what they're gonna do."
"Think when they do that, they'll be lookin' at you?" Merrion said.
Hilliard grimaced. "Ahh," he said, 'you saw Dillinger's column. Boy has that guy ever got the right name, fuckin' assassin he is. FBI shot the wrong man, they plugged John too bad they didn't get Fred."
"Yeah, but is he right?" Merrion said. '1 know a lotta people don't like Freddie. My father couldn't stand him. Neither can Casey. My father used to come home nights and tell us something Casey said that day, something in Fred's column. Dad'd be roaring about it. But neither one of them could say it to anybody else; it might get back to Fred. Hadda keep their mouth shut. People read what Freddie writes and pay attention to it. He could wreck your business. And Freddie buys his cars here, too; don't want to lose his trade. People think he knows the stuff he writes about -it's inna paper, right? It must be true. And when he really nails somebody, pretty often he is right.
"So, if he is, today's column, and you're goin' down the toilet, why the hell wear out your car? Wear yourself out, too. What is it, you get your cookies this way? Gettin' your ass whipped in public?"
"Jesus," Hilliard said, "I need shit from you, too? You're as bad's your old man was. He gave me a ration every time I saw him; now he's dead, so I get it from you? You better not take too much for granted.
Everyone loved Pat Merrion. They knew that's just how he was, always stirrin' everyone up. So they took stuff from him. You haven't got that record goin' for you. Your father was a good guy."
"That's what everyone tells me," Merrion said. "But if he was such a good guy and all, then how come he named me "Ambrose"? That's a mean thing to do to a kid."
"How do I know? Hilliard said. "Maybe he was havin' a bad day. You may've been the cause of it, givin' him a lotta shit for no good reason. Decided he'd give you some back."
"You still didn't answer my question," Merrion said.
"I know I didn't," Hilliard said. "And you know why that is, you fresh prick? I don't know the answer myself, why I work my ass off and get nowhere. I did I'd give it to you. Why the hell not?
Dillinger's right, I've sure got nothing to lose. According to him, my second campaign isn't stirring up any more excitement than my first one, when I lost. That'll help me a lot. Even though this time I'm more mature, so people don't see me anymore as an upstart college kid trying to replace Roy Carnes, I'm still not getting anywhere. What if he's right? What the hell can I do?"
"You left out the part about how even though almost everybody now seems to think the guy who beat you the last time's turned out to be a real asshole," Merrion said.
"Thank you very much," Hilliard said. "I'm really glad I decided to bring my car in today, so when I came to get it you'd be here to cheer me up. Instead of on some other day when you're up in Amherst there, taking Sandbox Two and Finger-painting One-oh-one, and old AL. would've been here. No imagination, AL. Never reads the papers."
Merrion was laughing.
"Sure, go ahead, laugh your ass off," Hilliard said. "I now see I was wrong, I said you're as bad as your father, but your father had compassion. Now I not only get the pleasure of reading Dillinger's abuse myself; I get to enjoy it again when you quote it back to me. Not bad enough Fred says I'm already a loser; now I'm a pathetic loser; you're asking me how I like it."
"You aren't yet, are you?" Merrion said. "We haven't had this election. Nobody's beaten you yet."
Hilliard stared at him. "Yeah," he said, 'that's right, they haven't.
I'm just being groomed to lose. You got some idea, I might win?"
"I dunno," Merrion said. "I got this problem. My mind sometimes wanders. I don't always think about things that concern me. I think about whole bunches of other things, none of my business at all. Today I'm reading Dillinger and since I know you and I also know you're comm' in, don't have much on my mind…
"Well: two things. You're obviously getting' nowhere kickin' the shit out of Gilson. As you've mainly been doin'."
"It's like beatin' a pillow," Hilliard said. "You don't hurt your hands but you don't accomplish anything either. People don't even listen to me. It doesn't bother them that he's a dummy.
They're resigned to it. Maybe what this really is is a matter of equal representation: Gilson's the dummies' alderman."
"So what I would do then," Merrion said, 'is quit alienatin' the jerks.
Stop even tryin' to talk to them. He's theirs and they're satisfied with him. Tell 'em you hope they'll be very happy. Leave them have him and go somewhere else."
"Like where, maybe Hadley?" Hilliard said. "This's where I live.
Gilson's got the at-large seat that I'm running for."
"But why is that?" Merrion said. "Why does he have what you want?
He's got that seat because two years ago young Roy Carnes decided he didn't want to be an alderman any more. He wanted to be a state rep, like his uncle Arthur used to be, before he moved up. There wasn't any new Carnes ready to step into his place. Open field. So you stood up and said you want the job, and the voters said: "No, you're too young."
They voted for Gilson instead.
"We now know why they did it. It was not because he's smart. Anyone who voted for him thinking that now has to know he's not. He's proven that he's stupid. So Dillinger's got that part right. They thought you were too young, and he was the alternative and he was older."
"Okay, but how does that help me?" Hilliard said. "He still is, he's still older than I am, and now he's the incumbent."
"He's still older'n you are," Merrion said. "But you are no longer so young. What are you now, twenty-six? Four years out of the Cross, 'stead of only two? You're an experienced teacher. You're familiar with the problems that face our public schools, 'stead of what you were back then: still feeling your way along, only your second year on the job. Not exactly elderly, but still more mature. Dillinger also said that.
"What you don't like's what he put with it, that you're not impressing the voters with it. Not convincing them you're not too young for the job anymore, so they don't need Gilson anymore to keep the seat warm.
Now you're ready. Kick him out."
"I start saying that," Hilliard said, 'how do I avoid pissing off every voter over thirty? That'll make 'em elect him again."
"Well, if I were you," Merrion said, 'the first thing I'd do would be call up old Roy Carnes or Arthur and ask if you could come up to their office and discuss the next city election. Tell 'em young Roy can sit in too."
"Why would the Carneses talk to me?" Hilliard said. "I haven't got anything they want. They're through with the alderman seat, gone on to bigger and better things. I've got nothing to offer them."
"My father started selling Fords here after World War Two because his boss down at the Armory was a nice guy and he liked him and he gave him some good advice. He told him once Japan surrendered the country wasn't going to need quite as many rifles as it did during the war. So there were going to be a lot of layoffs and my father was probably going to lose his job. Guy tells him: "You wont be the only one." Said lots of people were going to be out on the street, looking for work.
Maybe for more work than there'd be for all of them right off. The ones who waited too long might wait a while before they found a new job 'til we got used to having peace again. Smart ones'd be the ones who looked for work before everyone else started looking for it.
"My father decided to be one of the smart ones. That's when he came to work here.
"Arthur Carnes before the war'd always driven a Chevrolet. But then he had two arms. After the war he only had one. He couldn't drive his old car anymore, because now he only had one hand, and in order to move the gear-shift lever he'd 've had to let go of the wheel. He was afraid to do that, so he had someone drive him down to Brel Chevrolet in Springfield in his car. He asked them if there was anything they could do so he could drive himself around again, th out risking killing people.
"When he came in here that same afternoon what he told my father was the people down at Brel didn't really seem interested in his problem, and he wondered if my father was. You bet he was. The first thing he did was see whether there was something Stuart Dean out in back could do to Arthur's Chevy, make it so that he could shift gears without letting go the wheel. Stuart said Yes, there was something. He could make a lever arrangement, like a bicycle hand brake that'd make it so all Arthur had to do to shift the gears was reach his hand between the spokes and squeeze and that'd do it. He wouldn't have complete control but he'd have some, and it wouldn't take him but a second to do it and then grab the wheel again, so it ought to be okay. Stuart said it might be kind of awkward, but it'd work.
"Arthur said if it'd work until his new Ford convertible came in, he'd be more'n satisfied. My father said that was his first inkling he'd sold Arthur Carnes a car. After that when Roy Senior's father's old DeSoto wore out, Herb bought a Ford from Dad. And when they got rich enough so Roy's mother and Arthur's wife could have cars of their own, both of them got Fords. Roy drives a Ford, as you may've noticed, and so does Arthur, still. The one Arthur's driving now's the last car my father sold. Arthur ordered it from him the day before he died. That made eight he'd sold to the family, even though if they wanted to, they could all be driving Cadillacs by now.
"My father said what he admired about the Carneses was that they weren't the kind of people who just grab ahold of what they need or what they want, squeeze all the juice right out of it and throw the pulp away. He said Arthur and his brother acted like they were in it for the long haul. Kind of people who take an interest in what's going on around them today and try to make it better, because they plan to be here tomorrow and the day after that as well.
"That alderman seat was theirs for as long as they wanted it. It's out of their hands now because there's no new Carnes available right now to sit in it. Maybe there will be, eight or ten years from now, when Roy Junior's son's grown up, but right now there isn't. The man who's in it's a fool, and he probably isn't ever going to get any smarter. But he probably wont leave, either. He'll never try for anything higher, because dumb as he is, even he knows he'd probably lose.
"So what happens when Roy's kid is ready? By then Gilson'll've been there too long to throw him out. The Carnes kid'll have a fight on his hands.
"So then, why not save him the trouble? Go to the Carneses now and ask them if they'd like to help you change that. You'll knock Gilson off for them now, and then because you'll want to move on before too long, you'll leave it open again. As long as it keeps changing hands, when Roy Junior's kid's ready he'll have a chance. I bet Roy and Arthur would see your point. I bet they could help you a lot."
"You old enough to have a beer?" Hilliard said.
"Have one, yeah," Merrion said. "Buy one? Not legally."
Hilliard began to see the need for change around the end of March of '66, but he waited until evening of the third Friday in April to see if Merrion would raise the subject. He did not do so. After they parted that evening outside the office, Merrion declining to have a beer on the ground that if he did he'd flunk a quarterly in advanced psychology, Hilliard took inventory on the way home.
Things were unquestionably good. The black '65 Ford Falcon convertible with the red vinyl interior was hocked, but still nearly brand-new.
Mercy's Country Squire wagon was only four years old. The pale-blue three-bedroom half-brick raised-ranch house, two-car garage under, where he lived with his family on the north slope of Ridge Street in Holyoke, was a better one than his parents owned. There was no primary opponent in sight and the few Republicans in the district the southeastern part of Holyoke, Canterbury, Hampton Pond, parts of Cumberland and Hampton Falls as usual were snarling at each other. His grip on the middle rungs of the House leadership ladder was secure enough to permit a swift lunge in the next term for the chairmanship of Ways and Means. "Too good," he thought. "Must be time to fuck something up."
Over dinner of fried filet of sole with Mercy and their three young children, Hilliard tried out his decision to address the subject when he and Merrion had their customary week-ending meeting at the office the next morning. "Do something about it. Get it over with once and for all."
"Suspense getting to you?" she said. Marcia Hackett Hilliard had natural ash-blonde hair and blue eyes spaced wide apart, and she was a cheerful person. Even when she was obviously getting angry she looked like she still might laugh instead. She knew this and regretted it.
She didn't like fights 'unlike my dear husband, who goes around looking for them." She was convinced that she had more of them than she would have had if people believed her when she said she was getting mad.
Timmy Hilliard, who was five, thrust out his lower lip and used his fork to push his fish around his plate. Mercy, not looking at him but at her husband, put her right hand out and took hold of Timmy's wrist.
"But I don't like fish," he said, whining, trying to pull away. "You know I don't like fish."
"Tough darts, kid," his mother said. "I'm talking to your father.
That's what the meal is tonight. Either you eat it or you go hungry."
"Oh, partly the suspense, yeah," Dan Hilliard said. "Not wanting him to stew about it until Labor Day and then decide some crisp cool morning couple months before election he can't stay another year, doing what he's been doing since he was a teenager he's got to do something grown-up. So then he tells me, and what shape am I in? No election fight, no, but I'll still have my hands full, back in session after the summer. All kinds of things I want to do there, but now I am distracted.
"Suddenly I'll now also have to do something for Amby, right off. And it'll really have to be good, owing the guy like I do. While I'm making plans at the same time to find somebody else to put in his place and then get him or her trained while of course the new person trains me. Everybody who's good will've already signed up to run somebody else's operation. I'll have to settle for whoever's left.
"I'll be standing there sucking my thumb, marking time getting acquainted. Before I can even think about actually revving up what Amby and I've been planning to do since last Memorial Day. And anything that Amby'd like will've been filled since July Fourth, or promised anyway, people lining up support for the election. No, the time's come to deal with it; the time to do it is now."
Timmy's sister Emily, nearly seven, ostentatiously used both hands, fork and spoon at the same time, to eat all of her fish, her mixed peas and carrots and her mashed potatoes too. The baby, Donna, eighteen months, sat in her high-chair with a small bowl of dry miniature shredded-wheat biscuits in front of her, staring vacantly at an invisible point midway between her father's left shoulder and the top of her brother's chair. Timmy sat far back in it, his shoulders hunched, and scowled at Emily, angry at himself now for giving her the brown-nosing opportunity she was exploiting. "You're gonna be hungry later on, Tim," Dan Hilliard said.
'1 ate all my fish, daddy," Emily said.
"I know you did, sweetie," he said.
Timmy stuck out his tongue and said: "Poop."
"I mean it, Tim, really," Hilliard said. "You know we both want you to be healthy and strong."
Timmy shook his head. "Don't care," he said. "Don't like fish. Don't care."
"Future office-holder," Mercy said. "Got the hang of it already.
Rather be mad and go hungry 'n eat something he didn't think of to ask for."
Her husband laughed. "Uh uh," he said, 'not quite right. Future office-seeker."
"You're sure that's where Amby is now," Mercy said. "At the point where he has to move on?"
"Reasonably sure, yeah," he said. "And absolutely sure that if he isn't at that point yet, I am. It's what I think he oughta be doing.
Getting started on making a life in the real world for himself. He's a talented lad. He works hard. He should have a good life. He should have a nice family, like I've got. Good wife, like mine; a few kids, even though they don't always eat what their pretty mother works so hard to make for dinner every night so they'll be healthy, grow up to be big and strong."
Timmy reset his scowl and hugged himself. "Don't like fish," he said.
Then he thought about it further and decided to speak louder. "Hate fish. Wanna leave the table."
"Why, Timmy," Mercy said, 'that's an excellent idea. You get out of your chair right this very minute and march yourself straight upstairs to your room. And get undressed and put your pajamas on and get into bed, and you know what you will've done then?"
"No," Timmy said. Emily smirked delightedly. Donna gazed into space.
Now and then she patted her right hand on the tray of her highchair.
"You will've put yourself to bed without any supper," Mercy said.
"You'll've saved me and Daddy all the trouble of punishing you, which we really don't like to do. Only you don't behave.
But this time even though you're making us angry, acting like a perfect little wretch, you're also saving us the worry about what we're going to have to do with you. You've decided what the penalty should be for being a little stinker at the dinner table."
"No," Timmy said. "Not gonna do that." Emily giggled a little.
"In fact," Hilliard said, you' ll punished yourself more, I think, harder, than your mother and I were thinking would probably be enough to teach you a lesson we think you need to learn. What did you have in mind, Mercy, to make Tim see the error of his ways?"
"Well," Mercy said, 'to tell you the truth, I hadn't decided. I was wavering between using the pliers to pull out his toenails and setting his hair on fire."
Emily giggled exuberantly. "You shut up, Emmy," Timmy said.
"You know, Timmy," Hilliard said, 'until you just made things worse by talking like that to your sister, I was about to say I thought what your mother just said sounded a little severe. But now you've made me unsure." He sighed. "I guess I really don't know what to do to you."
Timmy looked apprehensive.
The transition from the stage of Timmy's disobedience to imminence of his actual punishment made Emily uneasy. She became solemn, pursing her lips as she began to pity Timmy. Donna began to shake her head slowly back and forth but her pupils remained fixed on the same point in space.
"How about," Mercy said, 'how about we tell him that he has to do what he said he was going to do, put himself to bed without any supper. I thought that was pretty good. But so he doesn't get the idea he's going to be the one from now on who decides what it's going to cost him to misbehave, we also yank his TV privileges for, oh say, about two weeks?"
Emily looked both absorbed and horrified.
"Too much, I would say, to do both," Hilliard said. "But it wouldn't be enough if we just did one of them. What I would say I'm probably leaning to right now would be either no TV for a full month or else your no-TV-for-two-weeks plus no allowance, either."
"Either of those sounds about right to me," Mercy said. "Why don't you decide?"
Emily had to squirm to deal with the suspense.
"Okay, I will," Hilliard said. "But it's going to be hard and take me awhile. You know how I hate to punish people. At least let me finish my dinner here, 'fore this excellent fish gets all cold."
"Okay," Mercy said, returning to her dinner, "I may even finish my own.
We've both been so busy here Emmy's really the only one who's had time enough to eat and had all her dinner. She's waiting on us for dessert.
Which of course I'm assuming you agree there'll only be three of those at the table tonight."
Timmy sank down still lower in his chair and looked morose. He sneaked glances at his father and looked like he might cry.
"Oh, that goes without saying," Hilliard said.
"Unless, of course," Mercy said, 'when you and I finish up here and I ask Emmy to help me take the dishes to the sink, it should turn out there were four clean plates to pick up, instead of only three and one still with food on it."
"You mean then I might not have to do it?" Hilliard said. "Not punish anybody? Well, that certainly would be better, lots more pleasant, if there were four clean plates. But there'd have to be an apology, too.
I think. Two apologies in fact. One to you, for being naughty, and one to Emmy, for being rude. Then I'd probably go along."
Timmy hesitated. He frowned deeply. Emily's face now displayed immense sympathy and hope. She urged him with her eyes. Timmy looked at her. Then he looked at his father. "I'm sorry," he said.
"Oh, not to me," Hilliard said. "You committed your offenses against your mother and sister. You have to make your apologies to them. And then you have to eat your fish."
Timmy told his mother he was sorry, and obviously meant it. She smiled at him and tousled his hair. He told his sister he was sorry, less sincerely. She showed she felt much better by sticking out her tongue at him. "Emmy," Hilliard said, 'don't think you need to start now."
Emmy looked flustered and cast her eyes down. Timmy picked up his fork and began to eat his dinner. "I still hate fish, though," he said, thoughtfully. At first Mercy tried hard not to laugh, but Hilliard didn't and so she gave in.
"Let it then be spread upon the record of this House," Hilliard said in a deep voice, 'that again-honorable Timothy Hilliard still hates fish."
Timmy laughed a little and Emily giggled too. Donna's eyelids began to droop.
"As I was saying," Hilliard said, "Amby should have a back-breaking mortgage to go with his school loans, just like everyone else. He should have worries. He looks and acts like he goes to bed at night and sleeps like a regular lamb. It's time he took on some adult obligations and responsibilities, keep him tossin' and turnin' all night like the rest of the grown-ups.
"I like the guy. I'd hate to see him just drift into one of those second-banana lives so many bright young guys settle for. Amby's got way too much on the ball. You see it happening around you all the time. They get involved in politics, not running for office, just helping out, but the stuff that they're doing's worthwhile. At first it's all right; it's perfectly fine. They meet some new people a lot like themselves and they have a good time. They get something done that they feel good about, and they manage to keep their perspective.
"But then the first thing you know, it starts to happen to them. You can see it happening, watch it right in front of you. They gradually start sliding into this sort of hip indolence. Get hooked on inside stuff; always in the know about what's going on before the dumb outside world gets a clue.
"They overlook the fact that all they ever are's privileged spectators.
All they've really got's their own personal knothole. The reason that they always know exactly what's going on is they spend all their time at the fence, lookin' through that damn knothole. They begin to think it's a big deal: they can look through the fence and watch this whole game that almost everybody else only hears about on the radio, TV, or read about the next day in the paper. Not too many people have this kind of access; it must be a distinction, something special. They think it must mean they're pretty special. They start to act like jerks, swagger a little, feel good.
"They're partly right. The access, the entry, your own parking place:
It's fun and it does mean something. It just isn't what they think it means. The reason there's the high board-fence around the game they're watching is the opposite of what they think it is. It's there to hide it. It's not there to keep the crowd out; it's there to keep the players in. The people without knotholes don't want 'em. They're the ones who put up the fence. They don't want to see the game. They think it's disgusting. If they had their way, they'd ban it like they do cockfights and bullfights and the dogfights in pits, and bear-baiting. Put in a king and then ignore him; that's what they'd choose to do, if you let 'em.
"Young guys don't seem to understand that. That once they settle for their knothole, that's all they'll ever have and that's all they'll ever be. Up against the fence all day, following a game that only matters to the players, watching a circus you gotta be in for it to count. Always at the carnival, best seats in the house, but all they're ever doin's lots of heavy lookin'-on.
"I delegate enough of my authority, give Amby enough responsibility, so that what his job amounts to is surrogate for me. An alter ego who works here while I'm on Beacon Hill. For a guy who's twenty-five, never ran for anything himself, most likely never will; knows he's better backstage than he could ever be out front: that's not bad at all. Very good, in fact. But it's not a career, or shouldn't be, for him. He's totally dependent on me. I lose, drop dead, or decide to be a judge? Amby's out of a job. But it'll become a career for him, though, by default, if he doesn't make a change pretty soon."
After nine, when she had put the kids to bed and he had read the stories, they picked it up again in the living room. "The years're going by," Hilliard said. "He keeps it up long enough and some morning he wakes up and it's his forty-seventh birthday, and he says to himself "Hey, I'm getting' old here, just like everyone else always does, the ones that didn't die. What the hell've I become?"
"He'll know the answer. He wont like it: Not very much. Just another political hack, gotten as far as he's ever going to, just waitin' the string to run out.
"No, it's time he made plans to become an adult. Maybe about time even that he started giving some thought to getting' married, setting up a home and family."
"With Sunny Keller?" Mercy said. Her tone was not as innocent of judgment as she would have liked if she had to speak at all and could not for once keep her mouth shut. Mercy had never wholly approved of the cottage arrangement at Swift's Beach. It bothered her, and Dan didn't make it any easier.
From the outset of it back in 1962, Dan while willing to concede that his approach to the landlady had been 'a little underhanded' thinking each time he did so that it was a lucky thing for him Mercy didn't know about the deals made, actions taken and understandings acquiesced in during his average week on Beacon Hill had dismissed her objections, saying it wasn't their job to elevate Sunny's or Merrion's morals.
Mercy took a sterner view. She said they were 'deceiving' the woman who owned the house at the beach by encouraging her to think that they were renting it by themselves and the kids for the month, and that Amby and Sunny were merely friends who were guests, or related by blood to one or the other of them.
Nor was that the only thing that bothered her. Regardless of what Dan said about it, Mercy believed that good Catholics did not countenance or condone fornication, 'especially by renting the place we know he's going to be using to shack up. And that's what it is: shacking up."
She did not think she was being too strict; Merrion and Sunny had no intention to get married that she had heard about.
"If she had a ring, it'd be okay, then," Dan had said.
"Not "okay," she said, 'but I wouldn't mind so much."
"Be kind of hard for you to mind at all, wouldn't it?" he said.
"Maybe," she said, 'but since they aren't engaged, it's very easy.
Unpleasant, but easy." As she saw it he was causing her to commit a venial sin by soft-soaping her into silent collusion, making her comp licit in the cottage rental.
As he always did when she slipped up, Hilliard laughed that Friday night and said: "That's my little Emmanuel girl." And she to her helpless irritation blushed and felt embarrassed, as she always did, even though she knew that she was absolutely right and there was no reason why she should.
"Should Amby marry Sunny?" he said. "I'm not sure I'd go that far.
Rather be a lonely bachelor all the solitary days of my life 'n be a worried husband all the time, any time I left the house. Sunny still looks kinda footloose to me.
"But then again, you never know. Maybe Sunny's the way she is right now because this's how she is right now. And when she's gotten it out of her system, maybe she'll be more like us. You can't be so hasty about people, you know, cookie. Just because when we were the same age that the two of them're now, we were already married and that was the right thing for us, with me runnin' for office and all that, that doesn't necessarily mean it's always gonna be the right thing for everybody else.
"But be that as it may, I still think it's time now Amby should get started on becoming an adult, makin' a real life for himself. So I'm gonna start kicking him out of the nest, see if I can shake him up a little. I owe it to him as a friend."
In 1964, when he won his second term on Beacon Hill, Hilliard felt his political future was secure enough to warrant borrowing money for the long-term rental of good space for a district office. Merrion found space on the second floor of a three-story brick building on High Street in Holyoke, last occupied by a businesswoman named Condon. "It's awful big, but except for that it looks good. I think it could work,"
Merrion said. "The Carneses own the building. They've had trouble rentin' it lately. The third floor's vacant, too. There's a tenant on the first floor but there might as well not be Saint Vincent de Paul Society runs a second-hand store there. Old clothes and used furniture. Only open weekends. Otherwise nobody's down there, makin' noise and leavin' food around, draw the rats. It's a very nice building. Old but very solid. Well-built, you know?"
Hilliard was familiar with it. He had been there many times, he said, 'but never once willingly. Lillian Condon's dancing school. Or, to be more precise: "Miss Jocelyn's Studio of the Dance." Jocelyn was her maiden name. She called it' he made his voice falsetto '"my stage name. I went under it during my career in the theater." We all called her the Dance Lady. "Hafta go the Dance Lady tonight."
"She was kind of a pathetic case, not that I thought that when I was a kid. My father said in the Twenties she used to quit her job in Condon's Drugstore every spring, travel up to Maine and spend the summer working as a chorus girl in summer-stock in one of the resort towns up there along the coast. Bar Harbor, Boothbay; someplace like that. Did it for three or four years.
Hoping for an offer that'd get her to New York; either get a job in theater or some rich guy who'd keep her on the side. And every September, she came back to the drugstore. Finally she got discouraged. Gave up on the bright lights of Broadway and came home, convinced what God wanted her to do was spend her life with her legs together, standing behind the counter.
"After a couple years I guess she decided it'd be all right with God if she made a slight exception and married Condon's son, Jimmy. He took after his old man; he had a degree from the Mass. College of Pharmacy and his lower jaw receded. Maybe his thing did, too. He didn't give her any kids. Or else one of the stories about her was true: she couldn't have any kids. Rumor was that one of those summers she'd had to have an abortion. Not that anyone really ever knew it for sure, so far's I know might've just been one of those nasty little secrets people like to make up about other people, put a little color in their own lives. No law says they have to be true.
"Anyway, Jimmy backed her financially when she started her dancing school. A couple years later he died. Maybe her being over there all the time giving lessons made him feel neglected or something."
The space had been perfect for Miss Jocelyn's gatherings. In the early afternoons, little girls in leotards and pink satin slippers chewed their lips intently as they pirouetted, whirling dust motes through the sunlight slanting through the big two-paned windows looking west over High Street. Late afternoons and weekday evenings, passersby heard the clatter of high school girls learning to tap-dance, making them smile.
Hilliard remembered the Friday evenings and Saturday nights: small crowds of older children ungainly and uneasy between the ages of seven and fourteen. The boys wore blue blazers and thin grey worsted trousers outgrown in the five or six weeks since their careful purchase one or two sizes too large, and ties clipped off-center to their collars. They huddled in a bunch and studied some openly, and boldly; most furtively, surreptitiously and apprehensively the girls across the room. Whispering excitedly and squealing in groups of five or six, in high-necked, short-skirted chiffon versions of long strapless gowns, the girls were learning to gossip. They were already covetous for future nights when they would have proms and they desperately both hoped and feared beautiful bodies and big swaggering boyfriends with half-curled upper lips and pants bulging at the crotch, begging urgently to feel them up; real adventures to tell and tell on one another.
"I guess the Dance Lady was fairly happy, though, with what she'd ended up with. She must've been; seemed like any time of day that you went by you could hear the music up there. She ran it about fifteen years.
Not the brilliant career she'd originally had in mind, but still, that's what life's about: making the best deal you can. If you end up the widow of a sterile chinless husband, with nothing to look forward to but teaching sullen little kids how to dance, instead of as a rich man's plaything named "Mitzi," you live with it.
"My mother's idea was I needed a gentleman's polish and old Lil'd give it to me. It was my idea of torture. Once a week, every week, during the school year. Friday afternoons, when I was seven. Saturday nights when I turned eleven. Until I finally turned thirteen and got parole.
Outlasted both of them, the one who made me go and the one who tried to teach me I still couldn't dance."
The space had stood vacant for three years since the dance lady's death at seventy-six. Hilliard remembered how she'd looked presiding over it: the brassy gold hair and the rail-thin body; the small breasts under the gold lame bodice sometimes askew, and oddly-shaped built-up, the girls reported knowingly, with wadded facial tissue but as high as they had been when she was seventeen. Either her imperial bearing required accompaniment or she feared quiet; she kept the room echoing with music, pounding out tap-practice tunes on an out-of-tune Chickering upright piano; cranking up an old Victrola that used steel needles to scrape Swan Lake, Les Sylphides, Tales of Vienna Woods and vaudeville tunes from her extensive collection of scratchy shellacs, proudly turning up the suitcase-shaped, grey tweed Columbia portable record-player. It remained 'our new, hi'fi, diamond' needle record-player" the six years he attended, groaning out ballads sung by Vaughn Monroe, Teresa Brewer, Vic Damone and Patti Page, the Singin'
Rage, for ballroom instruction.
"It's a pretty big room, though," Hilliard said. "Do we really need all that space? And can we afford it?"
"It is a lot of space," Merrion said, 'and we probably don't really need it. But we can afford it. It's not only more space'n we need; it's more space'n anybody in these parts right now seems to need.
Carnes people aren't giving it away that'd be against their religion.
But they also know that if the dancing-school lady doesn't come back to life or they cough up what it'll cost to partition it, they might not ever find someone who'll rent it. The room is just too fuckin' big."
"I wonder who it was originally built for," Hilliard said. "Wasn't for a dancing school, for sure. What'd someone want all that space forV "The agent said he thinks it was a meeting hall," Merrion said.
"Catholic Order of Foresters, something like that; one of those fraternal groups the new immigrants used to join. Organized to sell themselves insurance. Hire someone to teach them all altogether how to learn English, take the exam for citizenship." He snorted. "Kind of newcomers we got comin' up now could use that kind of ambition, you ask me. But then of course they've already got the right to vote, not that they use it. And speaking English don't interest them a lot. Don't need to speak English, get welfare."
"How much a foot?" Hilliard said. "You'll notice how I tactfully pretend I didn't quite hear what you just got finished saying, toward the end there."
"Yeah," Merrion said, 'you may not hear it, and you'll never say it; but you think it, pal; I know that. You think the same way as I do on that. You keep it all to yourself all the time, and deny it when you're out in public'
Hilliard sighed. "Some day I've really got to set some time aside, close the door and figure out how we reform you," he said. "It's something that we got to do. Otherwise some night you'll start showin' up for one of my debates wearing a sheet and a hood, calling yourself the Grand Kleagle. People'll start thinking I must have something wrong with me, I've still got you around, killin' time between lynchings. Definitely have got to do that, and I will, too, some day, right after I finish rebuilding the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
"But in the meantime, let's see if we can't talk about something less troublesome. How 'bout we start with the rent what're they asking for this place?"
"The agent's saying two-fifty," Merrion said. "I know he'll take two-twenty-five."
"What's that work out to, about?" Hilliard said. He liked strutting his mathematical skills. He had taught algebra, trigonometry and calculus during the six years preceding his election to the House. He looked forward to public budgetary debates; his calculating ability enabled him not only to show off but sometimes to intimidate his fellow aldermen and later on his colleagues in the House. "About twenty-five hundred bucks a year?" In private he played down his talent a little, deliberately only coming close to exact answers.
"About that," Merrion said, 'twenty-four-seventy-five."
"Two hundred a month and change," Hilliard said. "Let's see how he likes the sound of one-seventy-five. That'd bring it in under two grand, nineteen-and-a-quarter, one-sixty a month -quite a bit closer our speed.
"In fact," he said, 'more I think about this, what we ought to be saying's one-fifty. Sixteen-fifty a year, just under one-forty a month. We're going to be paying to heat the place. What do they burn there, anyway oil or coal?"
"I think the agent said oil," Merrion said.
"Good," Hilliard said. "Probably means the heating system's newer; wont be breaking down all the time. Tell him I'm terribly busy on the Hill and I wont have time enough to take a look at it until sometime next week. In the meantime, find out all you can, so when I do go over there, the two of us know more about the place 'n Carnes's fuckin' agent does.
"We're the ones doing the favor. Without us he's stuck with that space. Old Roy should be moistening his lips, getting set to pucker up and kiss me on the ass, I'm willing to be nice enough to take it off his hands."
The landlord's agent, Brian Fontaine, looked to be in his late forties.
He had reddish-blond hair that he combed back, and ) rather sharp features. He shifted a lot in his clothes, as though confined in them. He spoke softly and admiringly to Hilliard and Merrion about the building's many advantages, as though he had been calling their attention to subtleties of composition in a fine painting. Their conversation reverberated in the empty building.
Citing the fact that Hilliard's older or less able constituents would have only one flight of stairs to climb when they came for appointments, Fontaine pointed out that the broad wooden staircase was equipped with a pipe handrail in the middle as well as those fitted to the walls. He said the sturdy fixtures to hold onto with both hands would make older visitors feel secure while using the stairs. Hilliard remembered climbing those steps, treads worn even then, as slowly as he possibly could, and then after dancing school was over, vaulting down them two and three at a time, using the handrails as exercise bars.
"Yes," Hilliard said, 'there's that. But they'd feel even better if there was an elevator, so they wouldn't have to lug their old bones up two flights, holding on for dear life with both hands."
"One flight," the agent said. "You'd be on the second floor."
"Two flights," Hilliard said. "One flight up to the landing. Then, after you catch your breath, you've got to climb another flight -making two to reach this level."
"The staircase was built that way to save floor space in the building," the agent said with weary testiness. "It's one floor above the ground floor only one flight of stairs."
Merrion nodded. "That sounds right to me, Mister Hilliard," he said obsequiously, as though as anxious to ingratiate himself with Fontaine as he was to please Hilliard. "It's a reasonable thing that he's saying. You could have two landings, three landings, four, you didn't mind how narrow and steep they hadda be. Still only the one flight of stairs."
Fontaine took that as vindication. He let the reaction show on his face, sneaking a glance at Hilliard. Hilliard nodded and looked thoughtful.
"In fact," Merrion said, the conciliatory tone vanishing, 'the only problem I still have is do you think your elderly constituents, the ones with the cardiac conditions, pains in their chest all the time; ones who're all crippled-up and lame, need to use a cane; and in wheelchairs, even do you think they're gonna find Mister Fontaine's explanation as reasonable as I do?
"Or are they maybe gonna say: "Hilliard'! Second-floor Hilliard? He doesn't want to hear from me, what I need to have him hear. He said he did, when he was runnin', but that was to get elected. Now he's not mnarested anymore. Next election he's gonna find out something from me: I'm the one not innarested. I'm voting whoever the other guy happens to be." I'm afraid that's what those voters'll do, Mister Hilliard. You know how demanding they are.
They think we ought to cater to them."
Fontaine had to work his facial muscles to dispel the expression of chagrin that displaced the look of victory on his face, but he did his best to agree smoothly, pointing out the availability of similar space on the second floor of another brick building nearby, owned and managed by the Carnes family. "It's almost identical space, except that it's newly renovated and refurbished. Brand new Westinghouse elevator's just one of the many improvements. Best one they make, four-man car, top-of-the-line but very compact; so you don't lose that much of floor space where you put in your shaft. And at the same time it operates almost silently, very nice, and quiet. Most of the machinery's down in the basement. So that means you don't hear it start grinding and banging away up there over your head on the roof, every time someone enters the building or leaves. Be equally glad to show you that. Take you over right now, in fact. Got the key with me, right here.
"But I have to warn you: That machine wasn't cheap. Neither were the other renovations and improvements. We've had to raise the rent. It'll cost you a dollar a foot more for it'n Mister Merrion here told me you could afford which as I'm sure you realize isn't that great a deal for us. If the figure that he gave me, around two dollars a foot or so's all you can see your way clear to paying, well, that does limit what I can show you. But now if what you're telling me's that you think you may be able to go a bit more to get what you've got to have, we've got what you want."
Hilliard scowled and started to say something, but Merrion held up his hand. "Danny," he said, 'if I could get a word in here? I may be getting a little confused. It might help if I could get things cleared up here a little."
Hilliard shrugged. "Anything you think might help move this thing along."
"I must've given you the wrong impression, Brian," Merrion said. "I never said two-bucks-a-foot was the most we could afford. I never gave you any dollar-figure. When you showed me this space last week I said it looked pretty big. Maybe double what wed had in mind. And when I asked you how big it was, you said you'd have to check "but around a thousand feet, I think, eleven hundred feet." So I just did the easy thing, took the thousand-foot guess and multiplied it in my head, using two-bucks-a-foot as the number. Just trying to get some idea of what that would work out to be. Dollars-per-square-foot doesn't mean much to me; what I want is how-much-a-month.
"So when I said to you: "At two bucks a foot that'd work out, something in the neighborhood of two hundred bucks a month." And then: "Who pays for the heat?" that really was all I was doing. Just getting an idea, you know? Then you said you thought Mister Carnes'd say you couldn't let it go for less'n two-fifty, as though I'd just offered two, which I hadn't. I never gave you any figure at all, or anyway, never meant to.
I was just thinking out loud."
The agent looked bored and annoyed.
"And wouldn't my friend Roy'd say that since it's me," Hilliard said, 'who'd be renting this other space with the elevator, you should charge me the old rent? Roy's my campaign finance director. His office keeps my records. He knows how strapped for cash I am. Don't you think he'd want you to give me a break?"
"Mister Hilliard," the agent said, grinning, "I'm absolutely sure he wouldn't, and I'll tell you why that is. After Mister Merrion'd called and told me he was representing you, I decided maybe I'd better see Mister Carnes and fill him in. Because I know that Mister Carnes and Roy Junior, his son, and his brother, the Senator, all think very highly of you.
"I remember when you ran the second time for alderman Mister Carnes then told me when I went to vote for Roy Junior, for rep -his brother Arthur may've been running that year too, re-election to the senate he hoped not only that I'd vote for them but also vote for you. He said you were a very nice guy, and an excellent candidate all the Carneses were behind you.
"Well, if Mister Carries says it, that's enough for me. I took his suggestion, and not only did I give you my vote but I made sure my wife, and my sister, and father and mother, I asked them to vote for you, too. And I think they all did it, too, and every time you've run since then too. Which would mean, if they have, you've gotten five votes from our family every time you've run, ever since Mister Carnes said that to me. Although maybe not from my father, the first time. He went to school with Mister Gilson that may've swayed him the other way.
"So as soon as I found out who was interested in this space, I thought that maybe Mister Carnes'd want me to give you some sort of a discount which in this case would mean taking a loss. But seeing as how it was you, he might want to give you special treatment.
"So I asked Mister Carnes how I was to treat you, and quick as a flash, Mister Carnes came right back at me, and he said to me: "Why, the same as anyone else. You treat my young friend Daniel just the same way as you'd treat any other tenant prospect. Show him what we've got available that you think might meet his needs and give him the best price we can. The same one we always charge everyone in our buildings: the fairest and lowest price possible."
"That answers my question, I guess," Hilliard said.
"And he went on to say," the agent said, with delight, 'if you don't mind me saying this, also, that the Carnes family's already made quite a few large contributions to the various campaigns you've run. And to tell you he's got no intention throwing in the rent on top of that. He said: "Tell him we said wed support him. We never said wed adopt him."
Hilliard looked at Merrion. Merrion shrugged. "Hey," he said, 'always said there's no harm in asking. And besides, since I'm gonna be the one in there most of the time, the more people those stairs keep from coming up to bother me, the more I like no elevator."
The agent mentioned the amplitude of free parking on the steeply sloping lot out back: "That's what makes it so well-drained, when it rains," he said.
Merrion said: "It's also what makes it so slippery it's useless half the year." The agent looked perplexed. "You tellin' us you never heard inna wintertime cars go sliding down it backwards, end up crashing into the ones parked onna street? Even with their brakes on and the transmissions in gear. Mountain goats'd slide down that hill, they're on it, we get ice. Which's most likely why you got those iron posts on both sides of the curb-cut, you pull in the lot. Anna chain there you can hitch across it, block the entrance inna winter anytime we got a storm. So people like you who don't know about ice, never dream a thing like that could happen, can't drive their cars in there and park them, and end up where they cause a lotta damage. Which the Carnes family might then wind up getting' sued for, which is why there's no cars in it when we're gonna have a storm.
"Which is why it's most likely useless half of the year, when there's any chance of ice and that's the fifty percent that you really need it, there's no place to park onna street. A selling point that back lot is not. In fact what it is is a drawback."
The agent looked incredulous. "Really?" he said. "I never heard that before."
"Then you must've never worked inna car dealership here where they had their own body shop," Merrion said. "I did. You'd've been the guy who ordered trim parts and glass and mirrors for cars that got hit, and the taillight lenses and chrome; and then you hadda sit there and take it when the parts didn't come and the car-owners didn't like it, and blamed you when it happened; then you would know that it prolly did happen. Any number of times."
The agent looked chastened and said: "Well, I stand corrected." He called to Hilliard's attention the fact that the space was served by its own two separate restrooms. "So your people who work here wouldn't have to share these with anybody else. The way that all people in the other offices in the halls here on this floor have to do."
"Would have to," Merrion said, 'if there was anyone in those offices, now. Which there hasn't been any since the S-and-H Green Stamp people moved all their operation here down to Springfield."
"And I'll bet you a quarter," Hilliard said, 'that if I go in what used to be the boy's room sixteen years or so ago when I was one of the poor boys Miss Jocelyn was making their lives miserable for here, I would find that the toilet nearest the door still doesn't flush all the way unless you hold the handle on the chain down and then it sprays you so you look like you pissed your pants and that it's still got the same old wooden seat it had then; never been replaced."
"Mister Hilliard," the agent said, "I really don't know, I'm just the guy who does the rentals. I don't handle repairs or do maintenance, anything like that. They give me a list of the premises vacant. I rent them as best I can. You know more about toilets than I do.
"Now I have a question: How much're you willing to pay? "Cause I know you've decided and you wont budge, and you know what Mister Cannes told me: I don't have much latitude either."
"A buck anna half," Merrion said.
"Your original two," the agent said.
"We split the difference," Hilliard said.
The agent looked sour. "Good," he said grimly, 'that was fun. Glad it's over." He looked at his watch. "I may even get lunch today."
They shook hands. "I'll have the lease ready this afternoon. Otherwise tomorrow is fine. Just give me a call. Oh, and bring in the deposit and the first month's rent, too. That'll come to a total of three-twenty-eighty-two. We'll need to have that 'fore you get the keys."
"I'll give it to you right now," Hilliard said. He reached into the right inside pocket of his jacket and brought out a folding checkbook.
He opened it and tore out the first check. Merrion positioned himself so that Hilliard could use the checkbook as a pad and Merrion's left shoulder as a desk. Hilliard made the check out to the Carnes Company for $320.82. On the back he wrote: "First month's rent and security deposit High St. dist. off."
The agent took it and gazed at him. "Can I put this in the bank on my way back to the office?" he said.
Hilliard shrugged. "Sure," he said, "Roy knows it's good."
It was a bleak, painfully resonant room with varnished matched-board oak floors and oak wainscoating. Hilliard walked over to the left along the inside wall, passing the doors opened into the toilets and grabbed the ballet-practice bar still in place there. He tried to shake it. It was firm. "Handy," he said to Merrion. His voice boomed in the emptiness. "We used to put our coats here in the winter. Fold 'em over it."
Down below the front door slammed. Hilliard went to the window in the middle of the front wall. "There… goes… Brian," he said.
"First a stop at the bank and then off to enjoy his well-earned lunch.
Brian's an unhappy man. He thinks he has a hard life." He turned and looked at Merrion, still standing in the doorway. He grinned and said:
"Our first home, dear," he said. "Are you as excited as I am?"
Merrion laughed. "I might say that to you," he said. "I don't think I'd say it to Brian."
"You think Brian's a little light in his loafers?" Hilliard said. "He did mention he has a wife."
"He was careful to mention he had a wife," Merrion said. "He might even actually have one. Who's a woman, I mean I understand some of them do. Wife is a perfect disguise."
"Ever think about getting one for yourself?" Hilliard said, putting an arm around his shoulder as they left the big room. "Not that I'm saying you need camouflage. Just a matter of: Wouldn't you like to?
Maximum of temptation with a maximum of opportunity?"
Merrion shrugged. "I brought it up a couple times with Sunny. The last time she was home, in fact. She told me she'd think about it.
Said that the time before, too. I don't think she thinks she's ready.
Maybe just not ready for me. I'm only twenny-three. Don't think I hafta worry that much yet."
Hilliard followed Merrion down the stairs, their footfalls echoing.
Three steps above the landing he paused and said: "That stuff about cars sliding down the back lot did all of that actually happen?"
Merrion stopped on the landing and turned around. "You didn't believe me?"
Hilliard paused two steps up from the landing. "No," he said, "I didn't mean that. It's just that I've lived in this town all my life, and I never heard that'd happened. I'd've thought I would've."
Merrion turned back down the stairs. "I would've too," he said.
"Well, did it?" Hilliard said, crossing the landing and starting down the second flight behind Merrion.
"I dunno," Merrion said. "It could have."
"You said it did," Hilliard said.
At the foot of the stairs Merrion stood on the black-and-white tiled floor and smiled at Hilliard. "Not exactly," he said. "You told me to go find out about this building, who built it and so forth, and why.
Well, it turned out there wasn't much to find out. A guy named Reynolds built it, along with seven others, almost just like it, between Eighteen-seventy-nine and Nineteen-oh-one. Office space, for the people who managed the mills. And just like Brian told me, the dancing school was originally the Foresters' Hall. But I didn't find out anything, really, that would've helped us to drive down the rent.
"Therefore I asked him about ice. I don't think I ever actually said there was any. Or that any cars slid down the hill. All I said was I was surprised he hadn't heard about it. And I said I guessed he never worked in a car dealership ordering parts, because if he had've done that, then he might've heard about it. Then he'd know the reason for the two posts and the chain across.
"The chain and the posts're definitely there. I'm completely sure of that." '"But ice could be the reason," Hilliard said on the ground floor, laughing. He clapped Merrion on the back. "What do you think's going to happen, when he tells Roy and asks him how come he never heard about the ice, and Roy tells him he never did, either?"
Merrion laughed. "Well," he said, 'nothing, as far's we're concerned.
Brian's putting the check in the bank. Once he's done that, he can't back out. The deal's been cut."
By the end of the next week the room was spaciously furnished, leaving plenty of standing-and-arguing room among four old wooden desks and a scuffed-up oaken conference table long and sturdy enough to accommodate ten telephone desk sets on election nights and eight strong oak armchairs large enough for Hilliard and Merrion and six other robust adult males. Four of them came from the district and worked in it. The two who lived outside it were interested in doing business with the state.
They strenuously and passionately shared the purpose of making Hilliard look good, so that they would prosper along with him. But they didn't always agree on what ought to be done to achieve that. When they did agree they were often united in profane displeasure at some opponent's action or remark. So when they gathered at the table Friday evenings during off-years; daily and nightly during election years they often wound up shouting 'stupid bastard' and 'dumb fucking asshole' either at each other or in reference to rivals and opponents, pounding their fists as their faces grew red from exertion and anger.
At night the space that had been gently burnished in the evenings by the soft light from six floor lamps with golden-fringed red shades, when the lady with the brassy hair had held her Friday and Saturday evening waltz and fox-trot lessons for polite young girls and sullen little boys 'one-two-three, sfy-ud; one-two-three, sfy-ud; yay-uss' was now starkly lit by eight one-hundred-fifty-watt bulbs overhead, enclosed in white-frosted glass globes suspended from green-tarnished brass chains plaited with silk-covered power cords descending from white-spattered green-tarnished-brass ceiling fixtures. The fixtures were mounted flush against the chalky, white-washed, tobacco-browned, stamped-tin false ceiling, ornament ally filigreed at the corners with has-relief representations of palm fronds.
It was a good location. High Street was busy then and the new office, three doors north of the Transcript office at its center, was close to the Sportsman's Cafe where the newspapermen went to pie their own type after work, filled with inside stuff they couldn't print but liked to trade with those they trusted. So a politician facing a late night in the office and a makeshift supper at nine, aware that his best asset is curiosity and a relaxed mind works better, could take a short break around five-thirty and run down to the cafe without coat or umbrella through a light rain for a couple quick beers without getting his clothes very wet, 'just to find out what's going on." In the Sportsman's several of the men who sometimes shouted at each other and belabored the oak table in the second-floor office often met on better terms to drink Hampden Beer, CC or Dewar's and water, and denounced other men and each other in similar rough terms and the newspapermen laughed with them, feeling fortunate to be alive and important in exciting events, and to have such splendid tough friends.
Late that Saturday morning in the spring of '66, after the week's slate of routine but persisting annoyances had been discussed and new plans made to deal with them, perhaps even effectively 'this fuckin' time,"
Hilliard had cleared his throat and asked Merrion what it was he wanted.
"Because whatever it is that you want, my friend," Hilliard'd said, meaning every word of it, 'you'll have it. If I can get it for you, it's gonna be yours. You've earned it. If it's within my power, I'll do it, you know. I'll move heaven and earth if I have to. This you know's a true fact."
"Oh Danny, up yours, for Christ sake," Merrion said, discomforted and faintly embarrassed. He had cultivated the consensus about Hilliard:
"When Dan Hilliard says you're getting' a pony, a pony's what you're gonna get. You can go out and get yourself a red-leather saddle; you're not getting' a room full of shit."
Merrion hadn't asked for anything because he'd been being practical.
That was his policy. "That is how we do things, me and Danny. He has all the great ideas. I'm in charge of making sure they really are great; wont cost more'n they're worth or get us two into trouble.
"Dan and I've always understood each other, right from the very first day. As long as we talk it over before anything gets promised, chances are what we say will get done. We've always dealt in the same line of goods: only in possible things."
Hilliard used similar terms. "We may not tell you what you'd like to hear, that we'll do what you want us to do. We'll only tell you what we think we can do, and then if you tell us you want us to do that, we'll do our best to get it done." Neither of them mentioned the ballast to anyone else: "Things that we know're possible, because when we say we think we can do them, we've already gotten them done.
Merrion said he'd been thinking of appointment as an assistant clerk of a district court. "Pretty much ruled out the chairmanship of the Turnpike Authority," he'd said. "Nice job, pay's good; hours're great, but I don't think you can pull that one off. Pope? I'm not really religious, and anyway, I ate meat on Fridays 'fore it was allowed.
Chief justice? I'm not a lawyer."
Hilliard was going to be. He'd earned his degree from Suffolk Law School, punishing himself in Boston night after night and days as well in the summers during his first four years in the legislature. Awaiting the results of the winter bar exam, he could admit 'it fuckin' near killed me. If I hadn't been young, it would've." While still in law school he'd advised Merrion to drop his studies in education. "You're not gonna teach school; you're too stupid to teach. I've been a teacher; I know. Go to law school instead. Make my life easy: no matter how bad you screw up, I can always make you a judge. Any asshole can be a judge."
Merrion ignored him, getting his M.Ed, from Westfield State College. "I got some pride: Never even been inside a goddamned law school. I got other good qualities too.
"Courts sit in the summer. Judges' robes look hot. I think a nice quiet district-court clerkship's what I'd like; bug no one and no one bugs me. File papers all day and look out the window; have coffee; read the papers, movin' my lips. Talk about sports and politics, right? Basically the same stuff I do here' in Hilliard's Holyoke office, when not working as a substitute teacher, pretending to wait for a job-opening in biology and freshman composition, in a public high school. "If I don't find something pretty soon, I'm gonna hafta get serious about that. But it's not like I really wanna. What I want is something with the state or maybe feds. Pays at least nine grand a year and they can't kick your ass out in the street, next election goes the wrong way."
Merrion said clerkships met those requirements. "And your court job also pays better but that's not what makes it great -it's that no one's after you all the time like in this job, voters wanting something from you.
"See, the one thing I've found out from working in this job is that I don't want to spend my life doing it. I'm not knocking it now, understand me. I learned a helluva lot here, and I appreciate it. If it looked like you're headed for governor or US Senate, I'd have different stuff to do, manage a staff or something, like I do in a campaign planning events, scheduling, bullshittin' the reporters that'd be different. If you had a thing where I could be a chief of staff for you, like Larry O'Brien for JFK, or Leo Diehl for Tip O'Neill, that'd be a whole different thing a ten-strike, right up my alley; I'd love it.
"But we both know there's no way that's gonna happen. It isn't you're not good enough, or smart enough, or anything like that; it's because you're not rich enough. You don't have the family connections. It's too far for us two to jump. And if I get a new job now, I still want to work with you, run your campaigns. I love doin' that shit, as you know."
"I was hoping you'd say that," Hilliard said. "I think we're a good team."
"Well, so do I," Merrion said. "And I'm glad we both understand that.
Not going overboard here. But I don't want to deal directly with the public anymore, hand-to-hand stuff I do here. Since the civilians found out about we opened this office: people who want things from you now know they got a handy local place to go to, make their fuckin' demands. So they make more of them, save themselves a trip to Boston by buggin' me right here. I'm no good at dealin' with them. I don't like it and I don't like them, having to be polite to them.
"Sooner or later someone's gonna figure it out, and that'll be bad for you. So I should stop doing it, sooner.
"I am not the politician in this operation; you are. I am the mechanic. The world is full of assholes. I learned that by being your man in the district. I stay in this job for the rest of my life, I'll always be dealing with assholes. And I'll never get so I like 'em.
"I also realize no matter what I end up doing, I'm probably not gonna make a million dollars. So also for the rest of my life, while dodging assholes, I hafta think about making a living. Therefore what I have to do is find some kind of job that puts me in a different position.
Where instead of them controlling me, I'm the one controlling them.
"These people, Danny," Merrion said, "I'm telling you, I don't know how you do it. The six years I've been working for you, I've paid attention, watched you. Seen you with them; talking to them, listening to them. Half the time they're not even making sense but you still listen to them, like they're making sense. Going to their functions it seems like they're always having and you never get tired of it. Want to say to them: "For God's sake, will you shut up7. Stop talking to me." Never lose your patience. I don't know how you stand it. If I knew that I'd have to do what you do for the rest of my life, I think I'd go out of my mind.
"I've gotten so I hate them. Always pestering people like me to get people like you to get something for them cushy jobs and special treatment. When the truth is they don't even like us.
"You know what they're thinkin', they come in and see me? I don't think you do, and that's no reflection on you. When you're out campaigning, you're a candidate, sure, but also a celebrity. They want to be seen with you, maybe get their picture taken. Shows how important they are, the candidate knows them by name. So they're on their best behavior.
"You don't see the side they show me, swaggerin' in here to practically threaten me, try to order me around. They are fuckin' insulting. Act like they're lowerin themselves, comin' in to ask for a favor. Way they see it, they're the ones doin' the favor, for you, asking you do something for them.
"It's all over them; you can see it. Thinking: "Who're these guys that we have to beg? They're pols that's all they are. They don't deserve no respect. The only difference they see between politicians and the kid who pumps their gas and cleans their windshield down at Borromeo's Gulf is that you dropped into City Hall one day, maybe pay a water bill. And it so happened you hadda wait and a thought crossed your mind: "Hey, as long's I'm in the neighborhood, why not run for something', huh? Might be kind of fun." So you filled out some papers, and then next you got elected. Best day you ever had. You should be grateful to them.
"This is all of you guys now, I'm talkin' about here. Alia pols except Kennedy. He's got money. So he must've just needed something to do.
Did everyone else a big favor, outta the goodness his heart. But all the rest of you ran for something one day on a whim, and then you won, no work involved. Except for that one lucky hunch, you're no different'n the guy snarling at me is. Prolly not even as good.
"I was not prepared for this. My father envied pols; he admired them.
He wished he could be one himself. I used to think when I was younger, 'fore I went to work for you, it was too bad Pat didn't run for office.
Even if he'd lost. At least he would've tried; gotten it out of his system.
"More'n just the town committee. Selectman, maybe, or town moderator.
Or something part-time with the county. Because he loved the game so.
"He said the reason that he didn't, people sometimes told him he should run? If he announced for office, he'd offend people. Make a bunch of enemies just by doing that.
'"Just by running, you piss people off. Whadda you think you're doin', goin' after that job? You sure've got some kinda nerve.
"They think they should be the ones to have the job, even though they never thought about it until they heard you wanted it. So therefore they're mad at you.
'"And if I lose, can I still do my job selling cars? People're now mad at me. For the rest of my life there'll be a group of people out there who'll never buy a car from me. Or from any other salesman who works for John Casey either, because I work for him and that means it's his fault too. Win or lose, I hurt John. I don't wanna do that. Create a group of people who if they still buy Fords will buy them in Springfield because I ran for something their kid brother Mikie wanted.
If I beat him I'm a bastard, because I took what he wanted. If I lost, it doesn't matter; I'm still a bastard because I made Mikie work for it, made him spend a lot of money he could otherwise've kept."
"Okay, that's what he said. But now that I've been in it like I have with you, I think he was pretty smart. He didn't come right out and say it, but he knew what politics made people think of you; hold you in contempt. Even when you're the guy they voted for, who won. You put yourself in their power, and therefore they despise you.
"Everybody liked Pat Merrion as long as he was a car salesman. They thought his friends got better deals than people he didn't know, so they wanted to be his friends. He encouraged them to think that. Then when it came time for them to buy their next car, they'd think if they bought it from someone else their old pal Pat would be sad. They wanted him to like them. He had the power. But if he ran for office he'd be asking them to like Kim. They would then have the power. They weren't as good and kind as he was, and he knew it. If one of them ran and won, Pat'd admire him. If Pat ran and won, they'd turn mean."
Hilliard laughed. "You do need a change," he said.
"And the court job'd be a good one," Merrion said. "Unless people know someone when you're the clerk, you can say No politely, but say it. And if you do they're shit outta luck. I could get used to that very fast.
"Then there's the nice steady paycheck. Once you start drawin' it, you're set for life. Until it comes time for you to retire, at which point you get a pension. It's not like you start hoping your friend who got you the job loses his next election; naturally you still want him to win. But if some guy comes outta nowhere and sandbags him, well, at least you've still got your job. And on top of that, I've heard reports: There're people who say it's not hard."
"No,1 Hilliard said.
"That's a rumor I heard," Merrion said. "I also heard you get vacation, and every year you stay there you earn more of it. I first heard that, I didn't believe it. But then I think about it. I can see why this would be. It's sort of like sex, I guess, little bit like getting' laid? The more you like your work, the more of it you're naturally gonna do. And therefore the more rest you need from it. Or else your pecker falls off."
"I suppose," Hilliard said. "But could anyone actually tell when you were takin' vacation? How would they know, if they looked around and couldn't find you, that you just didn't happen to come in yet this particular day? Isn't that you're on vacation; you just don't happen to be there, is all. Taking the morning or afternoon off, maybe even the whole entire day, to take care of a few things you know? Errands and stuff, we all have to do now and then. How would they know you were off on vacation?"
"They generally wouldn't," Merrion said. "The clerks're a lot like reps are, in that respect. Which is another feature of the job I really like; the fact that you can be at work and on the job without having to be actually present in the building. I always envied how you can do that."
"It's pretty nice," Hilliard said warmly. "I've said that myself, many times. In fact yesterday, when I was in here, that thought crossed my mind. Technically I was in Boston, because we were in session.
One-hundred-and-eleven-point-six miles away, two-hundred-and-twenty-three-point-two miles, round-trip. Eight cents a mile, couple dollars in tolls, Nineteen-dollars-and-eighty-four-cents if memory serves, and it does."
"And plus which," Merrion had said, 'there's this other aspect of it:
You associate with a much better class of people than you do playin' politics. Better'n I see in here, at least. You're now hangin' out with the criminal element. These're the guys alia liberals think so highly of, victims of society. Much classier type of person, by and large, 'n you're ever gonna run into in politics, people breakin' their word all the time.
"Job in a courthouse, you got some idea what you're dealin' with. Day in, day out, most the people you see're common criminals. And fully qualified, too, every last one of them, to be where they are. You know what to expect. Violators of by-laws, orders, ordinances and rules, regulations, all of those kinds of things, and all kinds, misdemeanors there, too. Your lower-grade felonies, less'n five years; malicious destruction of personal property; indecent assault on a child takes a real classy guy to do that. Gettin' out of a jail before you're supposed to; or you tried and didn't make it, just for tryin'. Forgery, too, all that kind of stuff. Guys who unlimber their dicks at high noon and piss their brains out in the street. Right there in front of the church, Most Blessed Sacrament, say, up in Cumberland, just as the casket comes out. Beat up their kids. Slap their wives around.
Swindle widows; cheat orphans; pick people's pockets. Bang into other guys' cars down the shoppin' mall, right? Without leavin' their name and address, so the poor bastard never knows who it was, put the dent in his car. Let their horny dogs loose with no collar and license.
All of that kinda crap there."
"You've done your homework," Hilliard said.
"Damned right I have," Merrion said. "First thing I do, 'fore I ask for a job now that I had this one, at least is make sure it's a job that I want. This court job I'd fit right in. My kind of people. I'd get along with 'em fine. I'd doin' the same thing you're doin', the State House: fittin' right in with the crowd. Tellin' dirty jokes with the rest of the lads. Steppin' quickly aside but rememberin' to look sad, some pal of ours gets indicted.
"Always sayin' the right thing and so forth. "Tough thing they're doin' to old Magnus there. Trynah heave his ass inna jug; this's a serious thing. I hope it turns out all right for him. But do you think, just asking' here now, but in case it turns out they hook the poor bastard, I could have his parkin' space? Mine's awful far from the door. Rainy days I get all wet." Takin' care at all times none of the shit spraying him spatters you.
"I've thought about it, all of that stuff," Merrion said. "I can handle that duty. The first thing you know, you're in your courthouse there, forty years've gone by like a shot. And you have not changed a bit. You don't look a day over forty yourself. No wrinkles, no lines 'cept from Florida, maybe, goin' down inna winter so much, or playin' a game of golf up around here any time you can fit in a few holes. But no more'n, say, oh, three or four rounds a week. Wouldn't want to overdo it. How would you get wrinkles, livin' like that? What'd give them to you? Never a worry about anything; had a care on your mind."
"Well, your waist might get a little bigger," Hilliard said. "Might find pants a size or two larger fit better. But that's only natural; get older, you slow down a little. Lose a few teeth and so forth. But still chewin' your food all right. Making your way through the prime rib at Henry's Grist Mill. Another night a couple monster baked-stuffed lobsters with the butter and the crumbs the Lobster Trap does up so good? Little light table wine, wash it down? Well, that's what you gotta expect then. You eat right: you put on some weight."
"But that doesn't mean you ain't well," Merrion said, 'or getting' old.
Just getting' up there, is all. Need glasses all the time now? That's not age; it's all the readin' you have to do, papers and letters and stuff. You oughta get combat pay in that job, workmen's comp; all the eyestrain they put you under.
"No wonder you miss all those putts, can't see a bar-tab when you're out with a lawyer, another hard day on the job a drunk-driving charge against one of his clients got mislaid, again; nobody could find it all day. So they hadda continue the case, and this's the third time it's happened. Chances are if a couple of fifties show up tomorrow that complaint'll never turn up."
"Ahh," Hilliard said, 'you're not thinking, I trust, of that kind of career. Guys who do that kind of thing have been known to go to jail.
Guys who backed them for their jobs get most embarrassed. Reporters and voters are uncharitable; sometimes they think when a pol's friend gets caught dirty, that means the pol's a crook too. Can be a real handicap, next election. I sure wouldn't like to confront it."
"Nah, I haven't got the balls to be crooked," Merrion said. "And I wouldn't do it to you if I did. I owe you more'n you owe me. But lots of guys did have the balls, Dan, a lot of guys who never went away.
"Ain't it strange," they would say, "how things just disappear around here. Must be I'm becomin' forgetful."
"But you don't even have to do that. You're perfectly honest, do fine.
I know if I get it, people will say that to me, don't seem to have as much respect as they used to. "Pilin' up the pension; got it made in the shade; without workin' a day in your life. At least since you left Hilliard's office, I mean. "Till then you worked your ass off, doin' the guy's job for him."
"That's the whole secret of this thing, I think. The keys is that first you make sure that's what you do: you grow old. Don't do any of this dyin' shit they got there, no matter what anyone says. That, as they say, is a grave mistake. And then when you got that part down pat, no dyin' or getting' real sick, then you make sure to live well.
Live gracefully, know what I mean? So you get old, but you're still lookin' good. Like it was no trouble at all. That's how I want to go out. Lookin' good, like life was a cinch."
"Yeah," Hilliard said. "Well, you sound like you got it planned out pretty good. But there may be one or two other things we oughta think about here, geography and stuff. Which one of these little dukedoms 've you got in mind? Where you come from can be important. You should really come from a town in the district you want to go into, if that wouldn't be too much trouble. Don't have to, of course, it's not in the statute, but it really helps if you do. Especially if you're a young guy, gonna tie up the slot a long time if you live, as you will who ever heard a clerk dyin' in office? What the hell's gonna kill him? Overwork? Clerks don't die; they retire. Hometown boys have an easier time of it, when they gotta go through the hoops, getting' their names approved. But you're from that backwater there." '"Backwater," nothin'," Merrion said. "Canterbury's perfectly all right by me. I never hid it, I come from Canterbury. I grew up in Canterbury. My mother and brother're still there. He's got plans to leave, but she hasn't. I moved but I didn't go far, next town over.
I'll take the district court of the Canterbury Division any day of the week. They've got a slot open there, too. That's another thing I checked; they're a three-assistant court but for some reason only two 've been appointed. Third-assistant clerk is vacant, ripe for plucking.
"Canterbury District Court, yes indeed. Pretty town, always liked it.
Nice'n quiet; sort of country. Not too many girls there, but I drive;
I got a car, not what you'd call a really nice new car, like some guys I know of, but still, I got a car, and it runs." Merrion drove a maroon 1962 Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible with a white leather interior, white top and white sidewall tires, a cream-puff he'd grabbed the day it came in as a Valley Ford trade-in on a '64 Thunderbird.
"And you're sure you'll be happy there?" Hilliard said. "You wont be coming to me in a year or so, saying to me: "You got to get me out of this? I know I asked you, do this for me, but I'm losing my mind in that fucking place"?
"I think the world of you, Ambrose my friend, but I know you, and you like action. And you know me and how I hate going back to the well.
Doing things over I've already done, 'cause the guy didn't know what he wanted."
"Remember what you told me years ago, Danny boy?" Merrion said. "I first started working for you and wed won, you were an alderman. And the papers said right off that wasn't what you wanted, even though you just won it. Saying you were aiming to be mayor. And you said:
"Everyone assumes the job you go after can't be the job that you want.
Doesn't matter whether it's the one you go after first or the one that you go after next, when you've started moving up. They never think you've gotten where you want to go; some bigger job must be the one you want.
"The trick's to always keep 'em guessing, say nothing and sit tight.
Don't rule anything out. While you decide, for your self, which job you want, and why you want it. Then go into high gear, do anything you have to, to get that fucking job. And after you've got it, fake 'em right out of their shorts. Stay as smart as you always were. Keep that lovely job you wanted, and finally quit doing all the shitty stuff you had to do to get it, now you got away with it."
"Well, that's what I'm doing here now. I thought about it, and this's the job that I want. I can do something with it. I'm not lookin' for one I'll have to wait and wait to open up, and then when it does fifty other guys want it. I want to get in line now. I get this job I'll move up and retire as the chief clerk. This job's got my name on it.
"And if you can get it," Hilliard said, because he liked to tease Merrion, 'then will you have any immediate plans to make an honest woman out of Keller?"
"I'd have to get her calmed down some first," Merrion said. "That could be a tall assignment."
"You'd have fun trying though," Hilliard said. "All right, I'm in.
I'll go to work. But you've got some work to do yourself, on Larry Lane. Get to know him and get permission. Kiss his ass if you have to; hold your nose, close your eyes tight and do it. Too bad Roy and Arthur made the new district and built the new courthouse before my time. Be nice if I could just phone Chassy Spring up now, and call the debt. Technically it's his appointment, presiding judge and all, but Lane's the guy you'll work for. Chassy'll probably do it if I ask him, but not without Lane signing off on it. I hope you can work with the guy. I hear he can be a real bastard."
Hilliard's seven-year-old dark-green Mercedes Benz 300D sedan was not in the lot east of the clubhouse when Merrion parked his Eldorado coupe metallic maroon; white leather-grained-vinyl tiara roof, gold nameplates and badges, and narrow-striped whitewall tires. He was nowhere to be seen around the locker room or the putting-practice green. Running true to form: late.
For him it was like having an irregular pulse: He recognized it as abnormal but lived comfortably with it, so it was all right. Aware that his attitude angered people who had business with other people as well as with him, he considered their reactions excessive and did not become upset. "When I'm late I know sometimes people get pissed off," he said to Rev Peter Healy, a friendly priest and Grey Hills member, irritated by his tardy arrival at a communion breakfast. "I cram a lot into my life, much as I possibly can. Things sometimes take longer than I expect. Therefore I become late getting to the next thing.
Welcome to reality. I can't do much about it, unless I'm ready to start saying No a lot. In this case that would've meant I couldn't come to this affair. You would've been mad at me. Thus proving that in politics saying No to people more'n you have to isn't a wise practice; therefore I'm not ready. So what you have to do, dealing with me, is master delayed gratification. You may find that also solves that problem you've been having with premature ejaculation."
"You could call, though, once in a while," Mercy would tell him. "I don't like it, but I knew you had this problem and married you anyway.
I have to live with it. Other people don't think they do. They think the least you could do is call up. Let someone know you're going to be late. You're inconsiderate. All that matters is when you're ready to get around to doing something; never when somebody else is.
"I know," she'd say, "I know I know I know. I met Danny when he came to a freshman mixer my first year at Emmanuel. The next week we went out. A month later we were going steady. I haven't seen the beginning of a movie since I was eighteen years old. The only times I've seen the priest come out onto the altar've been the times I went to Mass by myself. When I go with Danny I'm lucky to hear the epistle; he thinks if you hear the gospel, you've been. I pretended I liked baseball when he was courting me. I didn't, but it's easy when the ballgames you see start in the fourth inning. You'd like me to break him of this habit?
Where do you live Fantasy Island?"
Legislative colleagues criticized him as difficult to work with, saying his habitual tardiness had a domino effect on their schedules, making others angry at them. Friendly TV reporters allocating regional and statewide air-time became unfriendly as he failed repeatedly to show up for interviews on time. Commentators who differed with him ideologically found sinister implications, delivering commentaries suggesting that his chronic lateness betrayed deep-seated disdain for ordinary people, scorn he expressed more subtly and harm fully in the liberal and elitist legislation he proposed and sponsored. One Globe columnist who was black printed his deduction that Hilliard's failure to show up for an interview was proof of racism, prompting a colleague who was white to respond the next day: "On the contrary, it proves his deep commitment to equal rights. Dan Hilliard runs his life like a no-appointments barber-shop; rich or poor, or black or white, everybody waits."
In the fall of 1972 Hilliard arrived an hour and twenty minutes late for a George McGovern fund-raising dinner at the Park Plaza. "No one in Boston last night probably would've minded much that the Democratic majority leader in the Massachusetts House decided to dine fashionably late," Tom Brokaw said on NBC, smiling broadly, 'if Mister Hilliard hadn't been the person scheduled on the program to introduce the presidential candidate." Brokaw's mischievous glee designating "Hilliard's gaffe' as 'one of many low-lights' in the chaotic state of McGovern's presidential campaign, 'reeling across the country from fiasco to debacle' suggested to Merrion and others familiar with Hilliard's urges that the anchorman knew very well what had deflected Dan from the performance of his duty.
Fiercely chastising Hilliard by phone, as by then he had done many times face to face, Merrion said: "Brokaw thinks you were off getting hid, for Christ sake. As I also think, and I'm not the only one, either. I think we're gonna have to get you operated on. Get you gelded like they have to do to horny race horses, get their minds off their cocks and make 'em behave, keep their minds on their business.
You're makin' yourself into a laughing stock. Wreckin' your career with your dick. Pissin' yourself. I'm your friend and I'm fuckin' ashamed of you."
Hilliard sounded miserably contrite. "Mercy's mad at me, too," he said.
"She oughta be," Merrion said. "Mercy's an intelligent woman. I'd be surprised if she wasn't. You think she believes you spend four nights a week in your Boston apartment watchin' TV and tattin' doilies? If she does, it's because she wont face the truth. And if that's it, it wont be for much longer you're makin' it too hard for her. You're embarrassin' your friends, Dan, but you're making her life Hell on earth. Everyone laughin' at you. Brokaw, for Christ sake on national TV; he probably knows her name, for Christ sake, who the broad is you're fooling around with. And your office didn't help any either, some beauty in there tellin' the Globe "something suddenly came up."
And if you try to tell me the Globe guy made it up, I'll tell you he should get an award. Next thing'll be Johnny Carson tellin' jokes about you inna monologue."
Hilliard demurred, very feebly, saying Brokaw wouldn't have any way to find out the name of the woman "I've been seeing."
"Oh put a lid on it," Merrion said, 'give me a load of that shit. What you're doing isn't "seeing." It's "fucking," "getting' blow-jobs."
Inna second place, everyone knows anything knows it's Stacy, and everyone who doesn't's going to pretty soon. Meat that fresh don't keep."
Stacy Hawkes was a twenty-nine-year-old woman who preferred to work chiefly in the newsroom as a producer for the CBS Boston affiliate; a former Miss Connecticut during her junior year majoring in history at Yale, she had started out in the business as on-air talent. She said she did her occasional award-winning special reports on state politics to keep her teeth sharp and 'make sure I can still do it."
Political reporters at competing Boston stations bitterly alleged she gained inside information by means that the males among them lacked.
The females said they would not work the way she did.
Late for golf with Merrion that August Saturday, nearly a quarter-century later, Hilliard had logged more than ten years in what he called his 'public-educator suit' since his retirement in 1984 from what he described as 'the open and gross practice of politics." Hasn't changed him a bit.
Merrion had not bothered checking the sign-up sheet on the wall of the pro shack to see whether they were still playing by themselves at 11:30 or if Dan, without telling him, had paired them with another twosome scheduled to start later. He sat contentedly in one of the puffy-cushioned light blue PVC-pipe armchairs in the dappled shade on the blue-grey flagstone terrace overlooking the first tee, at indolent peace with the summer-Saturday universe around him and all but one of the people within his field of vision in it. A mug of creamed hazlenut coffee cooled on the round white PVC table in front of him.
Over it he watched Julian Sanderson, Ralph Lauren golf ensemble artfully disheveled, set skillfully to work on the three new members.
Not that he lacked talent; what he would be doing, lightly adjusting grips and forearms; tucking left elbows in; widening and narrowing; opening and closing stances, turning torsos ever so slightly was overloading their minds, so that before they hit a ball that morning they would be focused upon doing their very best to hit it as he said.
During such engagements Julian talked only about golf and how to hit golf shots, the only subject except perhaps, sex -he was really competent to talk about at all. It was therefore likely that his clients might play better golf that Saturday than they had on recent outings that had caused them to hire Julian to teach what Dan Hilliard was fond of reminding himself and everyone within earshot when he put a tee-shot into the rough 'isn't about how to build a fucking rocket-ship to go to fucking Mars, just how to hit a fucking golf ball that sits perfectly still and says "Hit me."
This would be a development so pleasant they would overlook its temporary nature and not only give Julian all the credit but kick in their respective shares of the one-hundred-fifty-dollar purse fee he would be charging for playing a round with them. Merrion could see the basic fairness of this exchange, but he did not approve of it.
He did not like Julian. He believed that was not because Julian was good-looking. Merrion conceded the utility of good looks. Hilliard said that people often underestimated him because 'the choir-boy curls," now white but still thick, 'and the cherub's face make 'em doubt you'd even think of pulling a fast one on them. So you can do it now and then, when you think you've got a good reason, and get away with it."
Merrion regarded Julian as a nuisance. He thought that if Julian were to disappear suddenly it would be a good thing. Forty-two or so, a tanned and trim six-footer chiseled blond and handsome, with an athlete's languid ease of movement, Julian had six or seven years before accepted reality he'd resisted a long time: Contrary to his expectations, after much practice and success in prep school and college competitions he had turned out to be a considerably-better-than-average golfer.
Good enough to outclass all the other players in their age-group at their own clubs, such golfers can be worthy opponents in regional and state-wide pro-am tournaments. All they have to do is set their minds to it; short-change their responsibilities at work; slough their family obligations; get plenty of rest; go easy on the cocktails and watch what they eat behave, in other words, as Dan Hilliard said, though only for a while, like people who get it into their heads to become candidates for major statewide office or national recognition and then follow that regimen for two months every year. To be that good can be a dismal fate.
"Horseshoes and hand-grenades're the only sports where close is good enough," Hilliard said, when he missed short putts. On their very best days they are not quite good enough to compete successfully on the Professional Golf Association circuit. For nearly eight years Julian had time after time come not-quite-close-enough to making second-round cuts at second-rate pro tournaments up and down the east coast. It depressed him to describe his travels to naive visiting players who assumed they must have seen this man, said to have been a touring pro, in the company of Greg Norman, Tom Kite and Chi-Chi Rodriguez hitting long drives, lofting beautiful wedge shots and sinking long putts across the screens of their game-room projection TVs. "Oh, well, like the Nike Tour, out of Sawgrass?" Merrion had heard him say, elaborately nonchalant.
Having heard of the shoe manufacturer but not the golf circuit they'd look blank, saying, "Gee, must've missed that one." Their ignorance irked and embarrassed him; it did not surprise him.
Explaining, he would omit the fact that the Nike was a southern mini-tour, seldom televised beyond the reception area of the local cable-TV outlet with its headquarters office in the shopping mall on Route 1, or viewed anywhere except in the bar of the host country club.
He also passed over the fact that 1993 had been his last year of touring, and left out the $100 entry fee he'd had to pay each of the fourteen Monday mornings that he'd tried to qualify for one of those 54-hole events. He passed over the additional $150 he paid to compete in the nine in which he'd made the cut, having managed to finish among the top eight players during one of those gut-checking Mondays. He did not mention what it had cost him meaning: his father, Haskell; his friends knew him as Heck to live downright crummy during his touring days, paying eighty-five or ninety bucks a night to scuff along in roach-infested motels at the height of the tourist season, the alternative being to bunk unwashed in his car. He sloughed all the dreariness with a sigh and admitted he hadn't really done 'all that well, my last year only won about seven thousand or so," sixty-eight-fifty, actually, if what Merrion had heard from Heck was the truth in the fifteen seedy weeks he'd spent in Florida between New Year's and the end of March, the second-best season he'd had.
"Put it this way," Julian would say, dolloping his rue with the lop-sided smile of charming chagrin that attracted females, "I didn't play enough weekends." The third and fourth rounds Saturdays and Sundays followed the second reduction of the fields after the second rounds played Fridays. Golfers ranked below the top 64, 96 or 128 were excluded. Those making the cut were paired up to compete for the prizes on Sunday.
When Julian was very young and still in school he'd been startled to discover, accidentally, the wonderfully seductive effect self-deprecation had on women. Gradually he'd come to understand that it would nearly always work, forever luring a gratifyingly regular number of solicitous women to tend gently to his needs. "Lost boys," he confided to male friends and occasionally to tolerant female friends as well, usually when he'd had too much to drink, 'get mucho ass." Now, Merrion had observed, the angels ministering to Julian were of a certain age, but they still showed the old eagerness, flaring their nostrils and prancing around on the grass, their appetites and skills perhaps now even sharpened by practice, slightly improved by nostalgia.
Merrion recognized what he felt as envy, another reason for resenting Julian. In a few years, when the women in their early forties had finished with Julian, they'd be about the right age for him. But by then he'd have become a little too old to interest them in the tinkling drinks, light conversations and ninety-minute dinners understood by both participants as preliminary to vigorous and protracted sexual intercourse. But then again, perhaps, on a cold winter's night, wind blowing past the window… JFK? Sure, I knew him a little. One night down in West Virginia, back in Sixty, driving poor Humphrey nuts and..:
"Sklaffed too many off the tees in sudden-death," Julian said in the bar now, in the evenings to the visitors buying drinks, explaining his withdrawal from the tour. The kid was good in the clinches, no matter how he'd been out on the courses. And he looked as though he'd found a way to make up nicely for that deficit; for a player unsuccessfully seeking small jackpots the best player late on a mini-tour late Sunday afternoon during Julian's years had usually pocketed about twenty thousand dollars.
But he had an impressive collection of multi-dialed watches, and heavy gold chains for all occasions.
"Birthday presents, he tells me," Heck Sanderson said over beers one hot still late afternoon in the dark green shade. Merrion found that unconvincing but kept quiet, seeing Heck, though disapproving, believed it. "Lots of people like him, I guess. Women-type people. Like to give him things. Don't like to live with him long, though, seem interested in having babies with him." Julian was an only child. Heck had gone beyond the age at which his contemporaries had reported births of grandchildren.
Julian had been married and divorced once during the transition from his twenties to his thirties, but while he had had two or three steady ladies since then, the last had left him before George Bush lost in '92. Now he lived alone in a two-bedroom condo Heck had bought for him in a spartan half-shingled half-timbered white stucco housing complex on Route 2 west of Amherst. Most of the other tenants were young faculty from UMass. and Amherst College. Returning late at night in his monster-tired 4X4 Ford Bronco, he often had to clear his parking space of neon-pink and green plastic Big Wheels and small bicycles with training wheels. When cold weather closed the Grey Hills course for the winter, he commuted north six afternoons a week in the overcast darkness to tend bar at the Molly Stark Tavern, a rich skiers' hangout in southern Vermont. The previous May when he returned to Grey Hills to resume his summer career, he seemed to have what Merrion thought was a great deal of money for a barkeep, even a good one, generously tipped, but at least the job got him off Heck's list of dependents;
Merrion kept his mouth shut.
Julian had played well enough and worked hard enough in the PGA Apprentice Program during the mid-through-late-Seventies to earn the card that qualified him to enter pro tournaments for the coming year, when he was twenty-four. He was coming off a record of having finished among the top ten in nineteen New England and Canadian pro-ams.
According to Heck, Julian partially financed his first year on the road with $6,000 won from men whose professional success had made them overconfident. Mistakenly believing they'd become good golfers, too, they thought because Julian was a transient and they were scratch players on familiar home turf, they were each fifty or a hundred bucks a round better than he was. Because Julian was careful not to beat them too badly, many tried several times to disprove what was plainly so. Heck cheerfully provided the other $19,000.
From the outset Heck had agreed to provide $15,000. The additional $4,000 or so had gone to cover unexpected expenses: among them four new tires for Julian's Bronco, several disappointing pot-limit poker hands he'd drawn sitting in on a game down in Augusta, Georgia, the week before the Masters, and a flirtation with cocaine that for a few years scared the hell out of him -explaining his need for more money to Heck, he camouflaged it as a costly lesson learned in a high-stakes eight-ball showdown he'd lost in a billiard room in Baton Rouge. Heck guilelessly repeated that story to his friends.
Merrion had seen Julian playing poker and bridge at Grey Hills with some of the better-off but denser members. He had no trouble believing Julian had gotten hoovered in Augusta. Never having known Julian to wear out the felt practicing combinations in the hush of the mahogany billiard room at Grey Hills, Merrion disbelieved Heck's second-hand story of the embarrassment in Louisiana, but he didn't scoff.
When Steve Brody's kid, Mark, claimed to've seen Julian once or twice doing business with the dealer in Holyoke who had supplied Mark for about a year, until the night State Police dropped in on a buy, Merrion was not wholly convinced by Mark's story. He had no trouble believing Julian used coke, but doubted he'd use a local supplier and if he had, it was probably Steve's rotten kid. Merrion believed Mark was setting the stage to retail Julian to the cops unless his father's clout with Merrion, earned by faithfully looking out for Larry Lane, was enough to save his ass from hard time. That made Merrion apprehensive that the time'd finally come when he'd have to say something to Heck, no matter how much it hurt him. After Mark's diversion into rehab, he braced the kid for the truth about Julian. Mark rubbed his red eyes, snuffled his corroded nose and said Heck's kid had been clean for a year. Merrion hadn't told Heck.
Heck Sanderson hadn't needed that. He owned the Mohawk Printing Company on Route 2, a couple miles east of Greenfield. He claimed it was grossing $6.3 million a year, nearly double the amount it had been making in 1968 when his father left it to him, when Heck was thirty' Seven But for an unadventurous young man from a settled, comfortable family, prepared at Deerfield for Syracuse, a family tradition; excused by a heart murmur from military service; married to a childhood sweetheart from the family's Unitarian congregation in the town where he'd grown up, Heck had taken his share of punches.
His father, Haskell senior, had been a man of indisputably upright character, moral and honest to a fault. The fault was that he was a domineering, overbearing, parsimonious, 'general-purpose son of a bitch." Heck had had to subordinate his own mind and spirit all the years he'd had to work for Haskell, grimly deferring to decisions that prevented the business from growing. When Haskell died of a stealthy brain tumor undetected until three weeks before he died 'he got a headache so all-fired bad he was actually forced to spend the time and the money to go see a doctor' Heck had managed the ceremonies of committal with spare, bleak, formal dignity, and that was all.
Having come into the life that his brains and hard work had earned for him, enjoying a few reasonable luxuries like membership in Grey Hills and a ski lodge in Vermont 'if the old bastard wasn't dead, what I've spent would've killed him' Heck wife, Lisa, died at the age of forty-one.
She was felled by a cerebral aneurysm while standing in her back yard one sunny April morning, feeling very good indeed, a dark blue headband on her dirty-blonde hair, slim in her starched pale-blue man-tailored shirt, stone-washed blue jeans and white sneakers, her feet apart and her arms folded under her breasts, smiling in her certainty that she fairly sparkled.
When it hit she was talking animatedly with a handsome young nurseryman named Nick Hardigrew. He had blue eyes and wavy black hair, white teeth and the well-muscled body of a lifelong athlete, former lifeguard and outdoor worker. He had driven up from Suffield, Connecticut at her invitation to look at the property and prepare a bid on re-landscaping it, planting dogwood, cherry, silver birch and red maple trees. A certified arborist, he had earned his bachelor's degree in arboriculture at the University of Massachusetts in his mid-twenties after two years in the infantry. He had enlisted out of high school planning on a military career, but after washing out of airborne school at Fort Benning, had taken an honorable discharge. He had learned cardiopulmonary resuscitation so that he could support his family by moonlighting as an EMT while building his business.
When Lisa Sanderson collapsed he kept his head and used all of his skills on her, but nothing worked. When the Northampton Rescue Unit arrived he told the driver: "That oxygen's not going to work. There was nothing I could do, that anyone could've done. She was dead before she hit the ground."
She had died happy. When the stroke slammed her on her back, brain-dead, she'd been having considerable but very pleasant difficulty keeping her mind on trees and bushes. Having met him, she'd become convinced that her friend Nina Ealing from Longmeadow, another stylish lady on the board of trustees of the Springfield Symphony, was definitely having an affair with this young man. She had begun to suspect it when Nina blushed and became flustered, fluttering her hands as she gushed her recommendation of Hardigrew's work. And she'd become sure that he was now coming on to her, which she found charming and exciting. She had been consequently quite distracted by a fantasy in which she'd already given him the landscaping job in order to have sex with him on the green-and-white chaise lounge in the sunporch on some hot afternoon when he was sweaty and had removed his faded black tee-shirt and used it to mop his hairy chest, she having lightly and casually invited him inside with an offer of beer. She had also definitely resolved simultaneously, it seemed, and perhaps more realistically, but ruling nothing out -to ask Nina wickedly over a drink after the next board meeting whether Hardigrew's bedding skills were limited to gardening. Then her happy world and her fine girlish plans and all her laughing dreams disappeared into the last darkness.
Devastated, Heck nonetheless seemed within a year or so to have recovered his equilibrium. The following winter, 1973-74, he'd remarried quite suddenly, it'd seemed to his friends if not to his only child, then about twenty. Julian hadn't been noticeably affected by his mother's death. "Hardly seemed to notice it," Hilliard'd said to Merrion when Heck was not around. "Not that it didn't inconvenience him; I heard him tell someone that the reason he didn't play in the Berkshire member-guest was the first round was the day of her funeral.
But nothing serious."
At first the new marriage seemed happy. The second wife was young enough but not too young, and that was good, such balances being important when a new woman moves into a small and settled community as the spouse of a prominent member. Not that anyone at the club was ever really sure of her exact age; she looked to be in her late thirties, a copper-haired and very pretty divorcee he'd met skiing, up at Killington. Some thought it ominous that while her name was Alicia, Heck called her "Lisha' in their hearing, too close to his first wife's name to make them feel right about it "Lisa Two," they called her, behind her back; suggesting Heck'd seized upon her mindlessly, as a replica.
In retrospect there seemed to have been no obvious reason why it shouldn't've worked out, anything that should have alerted Heck's friends to what was going to happen so they could have been ready to help him get through it. She was certainly pleasant enough when you met her, and by the look of it she seemed to be at least fairly well-off herself, so she didn't appear to be after Heck's money. She even took up golf, right after they were married. But then before anyone had really gotten to know her, Heck the following July put it around quietly that they'd been divorced and she'd moved back to Michigan, less than a year after they'd been married. He seemed to take it pretty well without the help of friends, though: "Just one of those things, i guess," was about all he had to say about it. "I guess some things you just never know 'til you've tried 'em, and then when you find out they weren't what you thought you don't want them around anymore. That's the way it goes, some times; just the way it goes."
The consensus was that it couldn't've been Heck's fault his business remained intact.
Heck made no secret of the pride he took in what he'd done to expand the firm, building much of it on major printing contracts he'd gone after and won from the Commonwealth. A year or so after Haskell's death, Heck had come down to Holyoke one Friday night with Carl Kuiper, a major electrical contractor from Deerfield. Carl was a big beefy man with a big stomach he shelved on the waistband of his trousers. He complained that he gained weight despite considerable exercise, snow-shoeing cross-country in the winter; in the summer rowing himself the 2.5 miles from his big stone house on Hampton Pond to his favorite fishing cove. His face was deeply red, partly from rosacea, a skin condition that his doctor said was aggravated in his case by reckless exposure to direct sunlight. "But I always wear a hat," he said, disregarding sunlight reflecting from the snow and water. His doctor also said the rosacea meant he should avoid drinking alcohol. "Ahh, all I ever drink is beer," he said. "I sweat a lot when I work out and get dehyderated. I threw up and fainted once, I let that happen to me.
Not going to again."
Kuiper's place of business was outside Hilliard's district, but his voting residence was in it and he got a good amount of business from construction companies who had big and important projects in the region. He got more from the Commonwealth, and he considered those enough reason to warrant generous support of Dan Hilliard. He was one of the stalwarts, with a regular place at the big oak table for the 'dancing-school meetings' Hilliard and Merrion held in the second-floor office on High Street. Carl introduced Heck as a kindred spirit with some darned good ideas to expand the regional industrial base. Heck always kept his checkbook with him, too, Carl said.
In due course Hilliard led Heck by the hand through the whole rigamarole of negotiating State contracts, as he made a practice of doing with many businessmen he knew from his district and nearby anywhere in the Commonwealth, really, if they came to him asking for help, because in those days he was keeping open the possibility he might want to run for Congress some day. Under Hilliard's guidance Heck tuned his pitch to the purchasing agent in the office of the Secretary of State and the Governor's commissioner of Administration and Finance. He emphasized the ripple effect that expanded light industry offering steady employment for skilled workers would have on the economy of the area, disproportionately and dangerously dependent on _ i agriculture ever since the mills along the Connecticut River shut down.
Hilliard said he meant to make that the theme of his career. "The way I see it, taking care of the voters in the district means working to improve their future," he liked to say in the Grange and Legion halls out in the dark hills after summer had receded again, the fairs were over and the nights were starting to get cold. "The future of the men and women who get up every morning and go out and do a job, come home tired at night, hoping they've done something that day that'll mean a better future for themselves and their children. A better day tomorrow, and then an even better one, the day after that. To do that we have to bring industry back here. That's the only way, and so I'm determined to do it, make this place prosper again."
"What an utter and absolute load of shit that was," Merrion said one night in Hampton Pond, fatigued and hungry but still an hour away from a drink and a meal, sliding into the driver's seat of Hilliard's car he or another worker always drove between campaign stops, so that if the candidate's car hit someone or something, no one would be able to suggest it had happened because the candidate had been speeding to his next event, negligent or drunk. It had been maybe the second or the third time Merrion'd heard him unload that particular extravagance on an audience, but the first time he'd actually listened to it. Hilliard, also dead-tired, beat, had confounded him by snarling back: "That "utter shit" I happen to believe, you fuckin' asshole. Every last fuckin' word of it. Don't you ever sneer at it again."
Merrion had subsided, knowing Hilliard did not believe it, but wanted to, because after trying it out a few times, he knew it worked.
"Sings," was the way he put it: "That stuff just sings to them."
"The way I look at politics, and how it oughta work," Hilliard would say thoughtfully when the mood washed over him again and he felt the time evangelically right, embellishing the theme that sang, 'it seems to me that it should be the man who gets the job in Boston should remember where he comes from, and he should make sure that when he gets there and while he's serving you down there, he's still listening to what's being said out here. Still listenin', and still talkin' to the people, the people who said to him: "All right, now we've heard what you said, and we're sending you to Boston. Now let's see what you can do."
"So here I am now and I'm sayin': "All right, now what else can I do?
How can your government help you? And: How can you help, what can you do, to help me make our government work better?" See, we're just getting' started here. We're not close to finished yet."
"But Jesus Mary Joseph," Hilliard would say, when they were in the office by themselves with no listeners around, when it was someone like Heck Sanderson he was teaching to dance, 'it's awful hard helping a black Protestant bastard like this. Haskell Senior was a Know Nothing.
My father told me that. No Irish in his shop. "No Irish Need Apply."
His son takes after him, too. I'd bet on it. You swallow that stuff with your mother's milk, you grow up a bigot.
"What we've always got to remember with Heck is we can't trust the son of a bitch. He didn't come down here with Kuiper that night because his heart'd leaped up when he heard me. He came down because Carl convinced him I'd be a good man for him to support, because if he did, he'd make money. And if somebody else comes along tomorrow afternoon and makes him a better offer to dump me and go with them, Heck'll drop me like hot iron. He's got harsh words to say about his old man, now that the old boy's in the ground, probably with a stake in his heart, but Heck'd join the Klan himself if they gave him sound business reasons."
But Hilliard had done his best for Sanderson just the same and his efforts worked. Heck increased his financial backing. He described himself as 'one of Dan's oldest angels." Publicly he said no one was happier than he was when the new campaign finance law went through, limiting each contributor to a maximum donation of $1,000 per candidate per primary and per general election campaign, "Saved me a ton of money." In practice Heck saw to it that each of his top ten or twelve employees and their spouses maxed out in all of Dan Hilliard's campaigns after that, at no cost to themselves. "All open, perfectly above board. My shysters looked up the law. Perfectly legal, give my fine employees a nice raise if I want, so I did. What they do with it's their business. This is still America, right?"
In the same way, Heck at first took considerable pleasure as well not only in having a son good enough to play on the PGA tour but in financing him while he assaulted it. When asked, Heck said happily it had been worth the money. "I'm glad he's got that talent. Kid's got absolutely no head for business. Don't want him around it. Golf keeps him off the street." He confided to Rob Lewis the funeral director in Amherst preferred by Protestants; a member of the state Republican committee who'd become Heck's 'best friend in the whole wide world, now that Carl Kuiper's dead' that he'd bragged a little about Julian elsewhere that year he'd been married to Lisha. He said he'd mentioned his 'son on the pro tour' to other couples they'd met playing Indian Wells in Southern California and Dorado in Puerto Rico. Heck said he thought they'd envied him; at least the men did, anyway. When Rob said he thought they probably did, Heck repeated the story to Hilliard and Merrion the next time the four of them played, and they agreed with Rob.
After Heck and Rob had gone home Hilliard and Merrion had lingered over their beers and looked at each other, and finally Hilliard shook his head and snickered, saying: "What a couple old whores we've become. "A little light hookin'? No problem." Get so you can do it th out thinkin' about it. Someone says "bitch," and you pucker up." Merrion said heavily: "Sure they did, Heck; they really envied you. Anything you say." Easy for them; they never met the kid."
For six years Julian had been one of two assistant pros at Grey Hills, an independent contractor's slot that paid him $8,500 for part-time duties that were not clearly defined. It wasn't that he didn't have the credentials. He'd passed the playing and the membership interview, attended the PGA business schools and passed the written tests. His four years at Syracuse 'majoring in pussy, best I can figure," Heck'd said resentfully one night, after seeing some of the kid's grades had given him eight of the thirty-six working credits that the PGA required. The senior pro at Grey Hills, Bolo Cormier, obliging as always, had signed off on the other twenty-eight for the work done around the club. Julian was qualified, but it was hard to see what he did.
He was supposed to be on duty in the pro shop between 7:30 and 10:30 A.M. Monday through Thursday, but often he closed the shop just before 9:30, hanging a sign in the door promising it would reopen at 11 which it did unless the other assistant, Claire Hoxey, came in late for some reason or other. According to Hilliard, wearily serving out his third rotation of three years on the executive committee, Cormier had been repeatedly invited to explain exactly why it was Julian was worth his pay and what he did to earn it.
"Bolo has a little trouble with that," Hilliard told Merrion. "He says he's "real good" coaching juniors, on the ladders. Even though they generally lose. And even though most of us, every time we see the kids out practicing, it's usually Claire teaching them.
"Bolo says that Julian's also "real good" about teaching new members and members' spouses who're taking up the game," Hilliard said. "He can't actually name any duffers Julian's transformed into eight- or nine-handicappers, but he's sure it must've happened. Some time. Some day. To someone.
"I think Bolo's memory may be going. We may want to keep an eye on him. He could get lost out there in the bushes, one of those fenny dells out on the back nine where Bobby Clark always hooks a shot when he wants to get out of sight for a few minutes and have himself a drink from that flask of Bombay eighty-proof snakebite medicine none of us know he's got in the ball-pocket of his bag. Bolo ever got confused out there around nightfall, he could wander around until morning, die of exposure, hypothermia, we got a sudden cold snap or he fell into the pool, or one of the creeks. Wild animals out there too, you know; don't believe all this stuff they're always telling you about how all the catamounts an' pumas're extinct. They're still out there, watt tn for Bolo, getting' ready to pounce on him, WOOF, turn him into quick nourishing snacks.
"Then again, of course, it could be all's the matter with Bolo is that he's got trouble remembering things that never happened. Could even be that's the cause of his trouble. I think a lot of us would have trouble, someone was to put us under a lot of pressure, situation it began to look like it could be important to remember several things, all at once, in detail, never happened at all. Test a fella's memory, you know?
"And I think just throwing this out, not really saying it happened but I think maybe that's what Bolo might be trying to do here, where Julian's performance is concerned. Remember things that never happened. That would be a very hard job. I'm not even sure I could do it.
"Because Bolo likes Heck, as we all do. He knows Heck's always been a bulwark for him when it's come to backing Bolo, like giving him more money. Naturally he's grateful, thinks highly of Heck. I myself personally remember several times that Bolo's gone after a salary increase, and a number of rude people on the board've gone so far as to suggest that maybe he isn't worth half what we're paying him now, let alone a nice raise on top of it. Heck's always stood up for Bolo, said: "No-no, no-no, no, how can you say such a thing? Bolo's salt of the earth, a gem of rare price; he deserves a big raise in pay."
"So Bolo how would you put it here, huh? Bolo's "reluctant"? He certainly is; Bolo doesn't want to say anything mean about Heck's kid that might get back to Heck and hurt his feelings, maybe make him madder'n a hornet at Bolo. Who he's always taken such good care of around here with other people's money. So he sells him down the river, next time someone tries to tie the can to Bolo. That might explain this trouble Bolo has, every time we ask him what the fuck it is that Julian does."
Dan Hilliard came up behind Merrion's chair and clasped his hands on Merrion's shoulders as Julian finished tinkering with the swings of each of his three pupils and one by one began to settle them into their stances on the tee. The first hole at Grey Hills is a par 4, 412 yards, nearly straightaway down an undulating fairway. The breeze was from the southwest, left to right, tending to push the ball toward the rough bordering the southerly bank of the Wolf River. Three bunkers surround the shaded, slightly elevated green. Julian stepped back.
After a good deal of clubhead-waggling his first client hit a low drive that stayed under the breeze but hooked a little toward the low rough about 165 yards out. He stepped back and sighed theatrically, as though he had expected at least 210. Julian said: "That'll play, Pete, that'll play. That's the worst shot you hit today, you'll go home a happy man."
"Whatcha doin', Pilgrim?" Hilliard growled in his John Wayne imitation. "Plottin' revenge on your friend for bein' late?"
"Contemplating what has to be one of the more baffling ideas of western man," Merrion said in a low voice, so that it would not carry to the tee, "Julian Sanderson in his colorful native garb. I spent the morning, good chunk of it, anyway, with a woman who's a borderline defective. Her I understand, why she may be needed in this universe of ours. Julian I don't."
Between the beginning of 1967 and the middle of 1968, Merrion would not have told Hilliard about his morning chat with Janet LeClerc, not because Hilliard would not have been interested in what had happened to her, and what had brought it about, but because during that period he and Mercy had been coming sometimes violently to terms with the fact of Donna's severe mental retardation, and there had been no way to mention the subject around either one of them that was neutral enough so that it wouldn't freshen their pain. In July of 1968 the fear of hurting them had started slowly to subside.
Dan and Mercy had shown up for what turned out to be the last season at Swift's Beach. Merrion and Sunny had tidied the house and put all their gear into his Olds. Emily and Timmy were with Danny and Mercy.
Donna was not. They were all subdued. Mercy took the kids quickly into the house before Sunny or Merrion could say much more than Hi.
When the screen door on the porch had flapped slowly shut behind them and Dan was sure that they were out of earshot, he told Merrion and Sunny that he and Mercy had finally decided to do what both of them knew had to be done. He said that preceding Wednesday he had made a call to a man who owed him his job and continuing funding for several programs under his management at the State Department of Mental Health.
Hilliard took a deep breath and said he had told the man that regardless of how many there were on the waiting list for beds in the Walter Fernald School, or how important their names were, he and his wife would bring their daughter, Donna, almost four years, to the school on Saturday morning and say good-bye to her. He told the man it had to be that way; that he'd managed once more to make Mercy see it had to be done. The burden of having the child around and trying to take care of her was going to kill her if it didn't end their marriage first. He told the man he couldn't take a chance on waiting for their turn to come, lest she change her mind again. "And Malcolm did the right thing," Hilliard said.
That morning they had risen early, having packed the car the night before with what they would need on their vacation at the beach and all the things that Mercy, weeping, thought Donna might need to have around her at the Fernald School for the next several years that would most likely be the rest of her life. Hilliard had backed Mercy's green Ford Country Squire station wagon out of the garage and down the driveway of their home on Ridge Street in Holyoke; none of them spoke. He and Mercy sat stiffly in the front with their eyes filled with tears and Timmy and Emily sat silent in the back seat, each of them touching Donna wide-eyed in her car seat in the middle, knowing Donna wasn't 'right," because they could see that, but also fearfully wondering if their daddy and their mummy some day would decide to do this to them.
They had driven down to the Massachusetts Turnpike and taken that east to Route 128 in Weston, and from there they had driven north to Waltham to the state home for retarded children. "And then we left her there,"
Hilliard said.
"It wasn't quite the same as when I was a kid and we were going to see my grandmother up in Lewiston and we had to leave Comet at the kennel because the old bat hated dogs. But it wasn't all that different either." He said it with his hands jammed in his chino pockets, his voice grinding flat and rough and low, his face desolate except for the tears in his eyes. "For one thing, even though Comet didn't know it, in a couple weeks or so we were coming back for him. We at least knew we weren't abandoning him.
"And for another thing Comet was a dog, not my kid." He sobbed and shook his head. Merrion went to him and put his hands on Hilliard's shoulders. Sunny inhaled sharply, spun around on the scrub and sand underfoot and started toward the house. Hilliard put his head down and shook it several times and wept. "Isn't quite the same thing, I find," he said. "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if none of us ever really get over what we did today, no matter how many years we may be lucky enough or unlucky enough to have left to live, depending on how you look at it."
Merrion hugged him and patted his back and crooned: "Danny, Danny, Danny; oh my poor friend Danny." Hilliard said he thought the best that he and Mercy could hope to do was to make it through what was left of the day before bedtime for the other two kids, 'who now for the rest of their lives of course will always wonder if there was something they could have done or should have done or tried to do that would've stopped their wicked parents from doing what they did to Donna, whether they want to or not."
Merrion asked him if he wanted him and Sunny to get a room at a motel and stay up with them that night. Hilliard shook his head again and said No, taking out his handkerchief and wiping his face. He said: "We have to get used to this. There's no way to do advance-work on sorrow.
We have to get used to it ourselves, by ourselves. Might as well get started now." He said he thought that it was likely that he and Mercy would get at least slightly drunk and go to bed and hope to Jesus they could sleep, but that at least they'd know in the morning it would no longer be the day that they had gone and done the thing, but the day that it would be beginning to recede into the past. "One way or the other."
"I spent this morning chatting with the borderline lady, part of my day-job," Merrion said. "A couple or three years ago the people who own the Burger Quik out on the pike, plus, I dunno, seven or eight others in the area, they dreamed up entirely on their own this very decent policy of reserving all the jobs they could for people like my kind-of-confused lady. Girl. People who are not super-bright but can learn to take directions, if there aren't too many of them and they aren't too complicated. That way they become reliable employees. This is a very fine thing for a person to be, no matter how bright he is.
Doing simple but real jobs, not make-work which they spot instantly and know right off they're being patronized. Out of those basic jobs they can make something that looks like a real life for themselves -because that's what it actually is. They wipe off tables high-fliers like you and me slobber all over and then walk away from, never cleaning up the mess we made. They pick up trays and stack them and collect trash and throw it in the bins. And then they empty the bins and heave all the rubbish in the Dumpster out in back and soak a mop in clean hot water and mop the dirt up off the floor that we fine citizens tracked in. Not particularly stimulating work, but good honest toil all the same.
"Nobody made the franchise people do this. They had this bright idea all by themselves. It looks a hell of a lot like something you and I would've been real proud of, wed been smart enough to think of it back when you were still up on the Hill showin' off. We could've passed a law to make 'em do it, hire the retards, ram it up their ass or else we're gonna take their common victualler's licenses away and put 'em outta business. Or bribe 'em with a fat tax-break to do it. We'd've been real pleased with ourselves, if wed've thought of that. But we didn't. Neither did any of the other public-spirited geniuses we hung around with all the time. This was purely a private idea.
"Initiatives," I think they're called now.
"Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences turns out to apply to private good ideas just like public ones. Full fucking force and effect. This humanitarian idea had something nasty in it nobody noticed. The franchise people were making these retards into targets for the predators. Someone's going to tell them if they're smart enough to do this donkey work and get four or five bucks an hour plus the benefits our nice franchise people also throw in, then it stands to reason they can also swindle people.
"Because that's the kind of company they start to keep, not meaning to, of course, as soon as they start getting actual paychecks. They may be small, but those paychecks represent money, and money draws serpents.
First to see if they can get those checks away from those hardworking people who aren't terribly bright, and then see if they can't think up some way to use them, manipulate them, get even larger sums of money from other people. Some other innocent person who'd be on his guard against a crook, but who'd never suspect a poor retard.
"This case the predator snared first another lady who's also not stunningly bright and who also happens to work out on the pike at the Burger Quik with the lady who's now under my supervision. The plan was to cheat an old lady in Canterbury out of her savings account. The old con game; what Miss Iscariot did to make a living before she got distracted and found herself pregnant with Judas. The drill was that the two retarded ladies pretend that they found a bag of money which would be a flash-wad, couple fives and some ones and a wad of newspapers cut up the same size. They'd show the wad to the lady that the snake selected as the sucker. She was then supposed to agree to demonstrate that they could trust her to take the bag of money to the bank which they're afraid to do themselves because they're not very bright and the banker might cheat them, and that's why they need her.
But she has to prove they can trust her. This she's supposed to do by going to the bank and withdrawing all her money from it and then giving it to them to hold while she takes the paper bag to the bank and opens a new account in all their names, and deposits what's in the bag into that account. Which all of them will then share.
"While they of course in fact will be running like hell to join up with the boss crook who, you can bank on it, has got no intention of splitting the take with them at all.
"Except that this time the Fagin picked the wrong old lady. She knows which end is up and her ass from third base. Instead of doing what they told her to do she tells the bank manager what's going on. He calls the cops.
"The cops grab the three of 'em, the two retarded ladies and the crook.
Judge Cavanaugh does the right thing and tells the crook, who happens to be a broad herself, that she wont have to worry about board and room for the next five years 'cause the State's gonna take care of that for her. Both of the retarded ladies lose their jobs, though, since one of the job rules is you have to behave yourself.
"Still and all, it didn't seem to me or the judge it wouldn't do any good to send the retarded ladies to jail. So the one of the ladies who isn't my lady got sent back to her relative in Palmer who's her next friend, but since the one I've got doesn't have a relative like that, someone Lennie can appoint to act as her legal guardian, I win Miss Janet LeClerc.
"Now, all of this's all right. I know my role in this production. I know what Janet's role is. I'm the gruff but kindly public servant who's trying to do the right thing for the person who can't take proper care of herself. I also know what my part is in what's going on right here. You and I as gentlemen of very modest wealth but very considerable taste are going to play some golf and enjoy the rewards of long life in agreeable company, as is truly meet and just. These things I have got figured out.
"What I haven't figured out is the larger purpose Julian serves. As many years as I've known the kid and liked his daddy, better on some days'n others, I have never understood what Julian's function is in the cosmic scheme of things. I see that he defies the law of gravity, and most likely several others I'd rather not know about. Existing as he does without visible means of support sufficient means of support, anyway and I'm suitably impressed. But why is he on this planet? What the hell is he for?"
Julian's second student shanked his drive badly, high-hopping it off the turf into the grove of young maples down near the bend in the Wolf River to the right. Hilliard said he hit them intentionally because he enjoyed 'nature walks' along the riverbanks. Further down the river flowed placidly under a stone bridge set in the middle of the third fairway, just about a slightly duffed one-hundred-sixty-yard splasher from the tee. From there it proceeded through the maple groves left standing to separate the front nine from the back and out the other side, running along the fourteenth and fifteenth fairways and making a deep hazard behind the twelfth green. South Brook also meandered through the course, penalizing inaccurate irons on the eighteenth and sixteenth holes. Under Grey Hills proprietorship the streams that Jesse Grey and his friends had fished so avidly principally functioned as cold wet storage for slightly used two-dollar golf balls hit by players well-enough-off to call them lost and hit new ones for their mulligans rather than get their feet wet.
In the summer every two or three weeks, shortly after sunrise, teenagers from Hampton Pond and Cumberland sneaked onto the course and snorkeled the deeper pools where the currents deposited the lost balls, surfacing with thick-gauge wire baskets streaming water and brimming with a couple dozen Titlists, Pinnacles, Max-His, Staffs and Spalding Dots; those uncut were unharmed by immersion. Then the kids pulled on their jeans and sneakers and disappeared into the woods.
The near-pristine balls they sold in furtive haste for six bucks a dozen, cash, to frugal and unprincipled golfers emerging from their cars in the parking lots or cursing hooks and slices while thrashing five and seven irons through the bushes along the fairways of public courses in Chicopee, Springfield and Holyoke. That phase of the trade was also clandestine; municipal course rules gave their pro-shop managers the same full-retail-price monopolies on sales of golf merchandise that Bolo Cormier enjoyed at Grey Hills. The public-course pros jealously guarded those rights, posting threatening signs condemning the ball-hawkers as trespassers and forbidding patronage of them the kids often had to run from the cops.
Somewhat-nicked or badly grass-stained but still-usable balls went five-for-a-buck to the manager of the Maple Knoll Driving Range on Route 47 in Hampton Falls. It was his idea to retrieve the balls, knowing the practice to be illegal but confident that he could get away with it. He had provided the buckets the kids used in the expectation he would get all the balls retrieved, paying a quarter each for the unblemished ones and reselling them to his customers for the same price the kids charged for them at the public links. He was aware of their direct service of that thriving market, angered by their treachery, and powerless to do anything about it.
Some Grey Hills members fished the river and the brook early in the cold of April each year. By the end of May weekday traffic on the course, still moderate enough to permit play by twosomes and threesomes who could walk the course if they wished, towing their clubs, became nearly constant, and, afraid they would be hit by stray balls, few came to fish. On holidays and weekends in high season when the sign-up sheet filled early, club rules specified all must play in foursomes.
Cormier claimed to take into account the ages, temperaments, mobility and skills of players when matching up single players or pairs of friends but admitted he was not always able to. Members who seldom purchased equipment in his shop or tipped him less than fifty dollars at Christmas often found their partners uncongenial, causing hard feelings. Cormier scheduled tee-times electric carts required; no strolling allowed every quarter-hour between 6:30 A.M. and 3:30 P.M. A sign in the office above the sign-up book stated that Grey Hills policy was to enable 288 players, about three-quarters of the membership, to play eighteen holes during prime time at least once each weekend if they wished, allowing 4.5 hours clasped time on the course for each full round.
Members of all ages denounced this practice as scandalously rushed.
"Might as well play public links and save the goddamn money; going to be this crowded here," Rob Lewis said more than once.
Toward the end of Gerald Ford's term as president, a number of quieter members, original founders and their close friends approaching their eightieth birthdays, mostly retired, became morose as they learned one by one that age inexorably imparts greater inaccuracy and inconsistency to all aspects of most players' games. They began to play undistinguished golf. This not only made them unhappy but also prompted gloating, needling remarks by insensitive younger, newer members who observed their elders' difficulties when Bolo teamed them in foursomes. The older members found this taunting petty, but tried to pretend to be amused. Off by themselves they sulked and brooded, seething that the club had ever found it financially necessary eight or ten years before to admit the upstarts into what they still thought of as their club, forgetting they had angrily rejected the only alternative: to assess each of them a heavy dues surcharge to pay for needed improvements and repairs. At meetings of the executive committee they retaliated with barbed remarks of their own, disparaging the club's increasing emphasis on golf and allocation of resources to it as unwise neglect of its other recreational resources, such as fishing, that members of all ages could enjoy.
To rebut the younger crowd's assertion that so few members fished, they declared that they fished nearly every day each spring, when the more recent members, still with jobs to tend, were unable to use the club, and therefore were not around to see them. They said resentfully that they quit fishing in May only because forced to by the golfing traffic.
All of this was true. The fishermen Rob Lewis and Heck Sanderson among them would show up in cold grey April when the course was in poor shape, their faces and conversations severe. At that time of year they scoffed openly at golf, as inferior to fishing as a test, exercise and demonstration of intelligence, dexterity and skill. They said they stooped to golf themselves only because the other golfers made the nobler sport imprudent, lamenting their enforced neglect of a fine natural resource.
The considerable number and reasonable size of the fish that Lewis and Sanderson and the others caught from the two watercourses annually caused a small stir among Grey Hills golfing purists who saw them on cold weekends when they used the club for lunch and drinks and wistful conversation about great golf days soon to come. Finding the fishing outfits and the behavior of the people in them laughable, they had assumed that people who looked funny could not possibly catch fish. But the anglers had a point when they lamented the summer inaccessibility of the streams. They had plenty of fish, and members caught a good many.
There were some mature brown trout in the river, the largest of them one or two three-pounders were caught each year and immediately declared lunkers fattened by ten-inch rainbows stocked by the State Department of Fisheries and Wildlife each spring. The department estimated the cost of each hatchery trout at $1.50. Many of them perished soon after arrival, before fishing season opened, those that eluded the big wild browns caught and eaten by hawks, fishers and otters that had learned to gather in the shadow of Mount Wolf upstream of the club as soon as the state truck went back out to the paved road.
The successful anglers were proud in the clubhouse when they returned with their creels and found someone who would incautiously ask to see their catches. They regularly had several good-sized trout to show.
After the kitchen staff had cleaned and grilled the fish, the fishing members would eat them in the dining room with much boastfulness about their flavor and many foamy dark-beer toasts to each other's prowess.
They owed their fish to Hilliard. In 1975 when he was still a power broker in the House, one quiet afternoon in March he had idly fallen into reflecting about the previous Sunday afternoon and evening he had spent at Grey Hills, first at a quarrelsome meeting of the membership committee and then over dinner with Merrion. The night before he and Mercy had gone to a dinner party at Walter and Diane Fox's home on Pynchon Hill in Canterbury. Even though Merrion was also almost always there, at Walter's invitation, it was one of Mercy's favorite ways to spend an evening out.
"I don't know whether you noticed it," Hilliard said to Merrion, cutting his cold roast beef, 'but when you suggested last night to Walter that he should join here, he just about laughed in your face. I don't think it was because he doesn't like you, or thought you were making fun of him. I think when you said you'd propose him and I'd second, he didn't believe you think anyone we sponsored would get in."
"I guess I didn't get it," Merrion said, eating lobster salad. "I thought he just wasn't interested. Too rich for his blood, I assumed.
Walter's fairly cheap, you know. "Throws nickels around like manhole covers," as Dad used to say."
"That wasn't what he said," Hilliard said. "What he did was laugh and shake his head and say: "I dunno, Amby. I don't think those folks're used to you yet, never mind bringing in your friends." He especially mentioned Warren Corey's name, and Rob Lewis's. I think what he meant is that someone's said something makes him think we may be members, but we don't belong yet, and maybe never will. We didn't get in on our charm. Everyone knows we bought our way in the club was desperate for money; we happened to have some, or you did; they held their noses and let us in. But they still resent the fact that they had to do it, and have to live with us now. That was what Walter was saying to you. In doesn't mean we've been accepted."
Merrion shrugged. "Fuck 'em," he said, spearing claw meat, "I like it here. I think it's a very nice place. Excellent golf course, very well run; I don't have to wait to tee off. Decent food and they serve a big drink. Expensive but I got the money; so, what? Me being here bothers someone else, that's their problem."
"Yeah," Hilliard said, 'but I was very conscious of it today at the meeting. What people said, how they acted, whenever a name would come up: I watched them to see how they'd react. I decided I think Walter's got something there. These bastards may like our money all right, but they're not very keen about us."
"Ummm," Merrion said, nodding and chewing. When he'd swallowed he said: "You prolly oughta stop goin' to dinner at the Foxes' house, is what I think. They're a bad influence on you. First you think Diane's trynah break up your marriage, giving Mercy dangerous notions, and now you're tellin' me what Walter said got you so edgy you're lookin' for insults today. You're becomin' a little hoopy, looking for conspiracies. You and fuckin' Jim Garrison. Next thing I know, I'll be in the audience, you're the speaker; I'm prolly dozin', waiting for the finish when I jump up from my chair, kick off the standing ovation and all of a sudden I'll be hearing you tell the people it was Nixon who killed Kennedy.
"And anyway, if they are bigoted, whaddaya gonna do about it call in the IRA to blow up the swimming pool?"
"Oh no, much worsen that," Hilliard said. "I'm going to do is think of something I can do that'll make these bastards beholden. Something for them that they either never thought of doing or if they had, they couldn't've made it happen. But I'm not gonna tell 'em, right off, who did this wonderful thing. I'm gonna sit back and watch 'til they've gotten attached to it. Then I tell 'em they owe it to me, and if they want to keep it, they'd better kiss my ass.
"And I never said I think Diane Fox's a bad influence on Mercy or that she's trying to break up my marriage where the hell did you get that idea?"
"It's obvious," Merrion said, finishing his lobster and dabbing his lips with the napkin. "You're paranoid about Diane. Many times I've heard you say you think Mercy's spending too much time with Diane; she gets all her ideas from Diane. One of them's that you're fucking around, which you are, and that's why Diane worries you. Meaning you think Diane's got it in for you."
"Well," Hilliard said, "I'll admit I'd like it better if Mercy had other friends, too."
Mercy had served on the Hampton Pond Community Service Center board of directors that had given Diane Crouse Whitney her first salaried job in counselling in 1970, when she got her master's in social work from UMass. They had taken to each other instantly. "Now I think I finally understand how you and Amby became friends so fast," Mercy said to Hilliard, the night she met Diane. She was standing by the front-hall closet of the house on Ridge Road in Holyoke, whipping off her tan trench-coat and paisley scarf, swirling them like a matador's cape to put them on a hanger.
"I feel like I've known this kid we had in tonight for years and years and years. She's only twenty-seven, which I know we thought was pretty old then, back when we were, but now it seems pretty young." She leaned against the frame of the hall doorway in her camel-colored short wool dress belted with red leather at the waist, her arms folded. He sat in his easy chair in the living room watching TV.
"Especially for family counselling. She's in the process of setting up a private practice, she told me afterwards. I held up a bit outside so I could talk to her a bit more; she told me Walter Fox's already showed her two offices in Hampton Pond. In that she'll be able pretty much to specialize in therapy for adolescents, young adults. She says she's just a grown-up kid herself, but one of the luckier ones. She made the dumb mistakes and did the stupid stunts that get kids in trouble, but came through them pretty much intact. Lots of kids don't, and those're the ones she can help.
"In the job we're offering, she wont be able to do that, concentrate on one age group. The referrals the center will get from the clinics and social agencies, the court will be people from every age group. She'd have to find a way to deal with all of them. A lot of the people needing help're going to be in their forties and fifties parents who're screwing up because they grew up in troubled families; husbands and wives who aren't getting along; substance abusers. And elderly people; there's a real need for bereavement counselling. Her age could be a handicap. People tend to resist telling their problems and taking advice from someone who's younger than they are.
"So if we give her the job, will she be able to cope? She's confident she can, of course, but how can we be sure? She's just gotten her degree; her judgments can't be all that empirically informed; how does she know what she can do? What basis does she have? How can we be sure?"
"That's easy," Hilliard said, nursing a Lowenbrau and watching Karl Maiden and Michael Douglas wrap up another case on The Streets of San Francisco, 'you can't."
"But then I ask," she said, 'does it matter how old someone happens to be? I'm really not sure. Anyone who wants this little part-time job, that doesn't pay much money, is either going to be young and inexperienced, like she is, or, if they're older, they're probably going to have something wrong with them. Either no experience, because they're career-changers, getting started late in counselling or else when we check their references we find out why they left or got fired from their previous place. I think we don't have much choice."
"So do I," he said, his eyes on the screen.
"Ohhh, you're not listening to me," she said, stamping down the hallway into the kitchen. "I don't know why I even bother, telling you anything. You never pay any attention."
"I was paying attention, for Christ sake," he said, his gaze still fixed on the screen. "What is it: if I agree with you or I don't interrupt you; or I don't answer a question because you haven't asked me one I must not be listening? I haven't been paying attention7. For Christ sake, gimme a fuckin' break here."
"Stop talking to me like you talk with Amby," she said loudly. This's Thursday night and you're at home here with me. It's not Friday night and you're not down on High Street, talking big with the boys. Try showing some class for a change."
"Jesus H. Christ," Hilliard said, taking his gaze off the screen as the volume went up in a Sears tire store commercial, speaking louder so that she could hear him in the kitchen, 'first I tell you for once I've got the night off. I don't have to go anywhere." He heard the cork come out of a wine bottle. "This is good because you've got a meeting.
This'll be one night when the kids wont have a sitter. So, I'm a good daddy. I help Emmy with her math and I flog Timmy into at least starting to read Ivanhoe. Then I even make them go to bed. Now you come home and you tell me, well, the substance of it anyway, that you're very impressed with this young woman who just got her master's, and even though she hasn't got any experience and you're afraid she might have trouble dealing with older patients, might not be her cup of tea, you're still very much leaning toward the idea that she's the one that you should hire, give her the job and get it over with. So you wont have to go out to meetings anymore on Thursday nights when you'd rather stay home after dinner with your family. And anyway: no matter who you end up hiring, anyone could present problems. That you'll always have that possibility.
"Not that you came right out and actually said all that stuff, but what you didn't say I could hear anyway. It was implied." The titles began to roll for Harry'O, starring David Janssen.
She came into the living room with a goblet of white wine and sat down.
"Okay wise guy," she said, 'so I guess you were listening. You're so smart, tell me what I do now."
"Is that my good Muscadet you're drinking?" he said.
"No it's not," she said. "It's the cheap Almaden Mountain white, from the jug. Now answer my question."
"Go through the rest of the interview process," he said. "Then when it's over, turn on the charm with the other committee members and hire her."
"I don't want to go through it," she said, pouting and sipping the wine. "She's the fourth person we've interviewed now. That's six hours we've put in, listening to people tell us how much they want the job."
"You sound like Emmy with her algebra," he said. "Don't see why they make us take this. I don't like it."
Mercy tossed her hair. "I do not," she said, 'and I don't care if I do so there." He laughed. "Six others we didn't even grant interviews to, they were so obviously unqualified. We've got four more scheduled to come in. One's a for tv-six-year-old psychology Ph.D. on the staff full-time at the Knox State Hospital. His letter says he wants to set up a private practice and he's decided Hampton Pond's where he wants to do it. He's making eighteen thousand dollars a year as a senior therapist and he's only got three more years to go at Knox which he can't do and come here at the same time before he qualifies for a pension. I'm not sure I believe him. It doesn't make sense to me.
Either he's fooling himself or he's playing with us. He's not going to dump that fairly good salary now and take our little job, paying six thousand dollars a year; if all he has to do is tough it out at Knox three more years and retire. There'll be another little job around some other pretty little town three years from now; he can start his practice then.
"The others that we've said we'll talk to: there's something slightly wrong with them too. You look at the resumes and think to yourself:
"Gee, I wish that wasn't there." "I'd feel better, she didn't have that."
"This other woman; she's forty-eight. That's a good age for our job; young enough to talk to the kids but still mature enough to be accepted by the older patients. She's had children, boy and a girl, both grown now, off on their own, apparently doing just fine. She's been divorced. Okay, nothing wrong with that anymore, having gone through a divorce; getting so more have 'n haven't."
She paused and chewed her lower lip. "Oh, must tell you this: this Diane also asked me, very casually, just by the way, out there in the parking lot, if Walter Fox might be getting a divorce. Well, I know from you that he is, but I'm not sure she should get it from me. So I said I didn't know. I think she might have her eye on him. Little old for her, you'd think, but still…"
"Oh, I'd think Walter can still probably get it up once a month or so, he gets proper rest and eats right," Hilliard said.
"Pig," she said. "Anyway, this woman's divorced: how that gives me a small problem? It's because she's been divorced three times. Once, even twice: sure, I could understand, but is it likely this woman's had three marriages fail and every time it was the other person's fault1.
That's hard to believe. And even if that's the case, she did have that much bad luck, it would still bother me. One way or the other that has to say something about what kind of judgment she's got, picking three husbands she couldn't live with. I'm certainly not going to want to hire her. I don't think anyone else will, either. So I don't think we need to see her. We should cancel that interview.
"Am I being fair?" she said. "Probably not. This younger woman's been through a divorce, and she isn't thirty yet. Plenty of time yet for her to rack up a couple more husbands, before she turns forty-eight. Would that make a difference to me? Could be. But she isn't forty-eight yet, she's twenty-seven, and her having the one marriage now behind her doesn't cause me the same concern.
"It's the same thing with the other two," Mercy said. "Something on their resumes that says regardless of how articulate, personable and compassionate they may turn out to be when they come in, we're not going to want to hire them. One's a man who admits that he's an alcoholic. He tries to make it into an advantage.
Says he's been sober eight years he's forty-two now and he's counselled many other alcoholics who've told him he's got a special empathy for drunks. Maybe he has, but so've bartenders, and drunks aren't the only kind of patients we get. A lot of them, sure, but that's not enough, knowing how to get the boozers into AA and get themselves straightened out. I don't want him.
"The other one's another man who's also got something in his background that disturbs me: he got all his training from his church. It's one of those evangelical Protestant churches, and for all I know he's a very fine man. But what we're looking for here's a counselor, not a lay preacher, and I think if we hire him every priest and minister and rabbi for miles around'd be up in arms."
"ACLU probably too," Hilliard said. "Public money funding private religion paying for missionary work. Nothing like a good old little church-and-state dust-up, get everyone's bowels in an uproar. No, I think you're right about all I doubt you'll hire any of them."
"So then," she said, "I should call up the others and see if they agree that we should cancel the rest we've got scheduled? Say: "Let's hire this one we saw last night. I think she's great. She's smart and she's eager and with the alimony I assume she gets she can live on our salary. And call up the others and tell them we're sorry but we've filled the job, and we wont be talking to them."
"Rotten idea," he said. "Please don't do that." "Why?" she said.
"I'm sure it's what we should do." lYou are," he said. "The other four people on the search committee may not be. One of them may be secretly backing one of those three or four candidates you now want to brush off -or one of the others you've already seen who didn't impress you as much. Don't forget that the committee called for these statements of interest, invited and solicited those applications.
People go to infinite pains when they compose those things. Their lives and egos go on those sheets of paper. They're not going to be pleased if you now just go and dump them.
"And the instant that you try to do what you said, any member of the committee who's got a candidate's going to be dead-set against anything and everything you propose after that. No matter how great the new friend you met tonight seems to you, they'll never vote for her; you will've made her into "Mercy's candidate." Never mind how pissed-off the candidates you didn't have come in'll be, with some justification; the other people on the committee'll start hollering bloody murder.
"You're as bad's your husband, going outside the process, ramming stuff down people's throats. You're trying to railroad us; who the hell do you think you are?"
"Even though they pestered you to get involved because they know with Donna in the Fernald we're interested in mental health, and you might even know something about what a counsellor needs to be. And because they figure maybe you can sweet-talk me into getting state money for their center. And maybe you might be able to do that, if everybody plays nice. But that little scheme'll go right by the boards if they decide now you're trying to run the show for them. You try to bull something through on this, they'll turn on you like dogs. People who don't like me will oppose your choice for that reason, and people who oppose you will try to get back at you through me. Don't do it.
Scuttle the statewide phase, sure, but honor the rest of the appointments."
"I really liked her, though," Mercy said.
"I understand that," Hilliard said. "You've made that very clear. Try not to do it again, with anybody else. Don't let on yet how impressed you were. Anyone asks, be open without telling them much. Be creative with the truth; if you have to, lie discreetly: misrepresent stuff they wont ever be able to prove. Say you're determined to keep an open mind. Give all the applicants fair, impartial hearings. You may've been more impressed with one or two than you were with a couple others, but that may be just the way you happened to feel the night they interviewed. May want to change your mind before you vote. You might let it slip out you think the best so far might be this what'd you say her name is?"
"Diane Whitney," Mercy said. "Her maiden name was Crouse. She's originally a midwesterner. Came here when she was still married her husband had a job at UMass." teaching economics. She's really quite pretty; sort of freckled, reddish hair, ties it back in a bun; might have a slight problem with her weight, I'd guess, but who hasn't. I can't imagine why any man who was married to her would ever want to divorce her."
"Maybe he didn't," Hilliard said. "Sometimes it's the lady's idea."
Walter Fox's divorce from Jackie had come through in the fall of 1970, a few months after Diane's appointment as the resident counselor at the Hampton Pond Community Service Center. Early in 1971 they married, Diane prevailing upon him to sell the massive white Victorian mansion in Hampton Falls left to him by his grandfather Phil and for their wedding present buy one of the properties his agency listed. It was a beautifully kept Federal Period two-story grey wooden house with white trim and a yellow door set among the oaks and maples on the rocky knob of Pynchon Hill. Her principal motive was the sunny new kitchen shrewdly installed at great but tax-deductible expense by the previous occupants, bent upon selling quickly at a good price. But they could afford it; Diane's practice had prospered nicely, and although Walter's extremely conservative management of the Fox Agency tended to keep profits small, they were steady.
Feeling herself unexpectedly settled and secure as she approached thirty, she began to develop an interest in what she called 'really serious cooking." Sabatier knives protruded from the birch block next to the stainless-steel six-burner gas range. The Zero King refrigerator dispensed cubed and cracked ice. Diane's was the first Cuisinart Mercy Hilliard saw in someone else's home.
"And the nicest thing about all of the equipment," Mercy said, 'is the absolute magic she does with it." Mercy admired her new friend boundlessly. The nine-year difference in their ages bothered neither of them at all. They talked on the phone four or five times a week and lunched every Friday in the glass-enclosed Flower Room at Gino's Hearthside, ordering salads nicoise and drinking iced tea so as to avoid gaining weight, and also so that neither Diane's patients nor Mercy's classmates in the UMass. graduate school of education would detect alcohol on their breath Friday afternoons.
To Hilhard it seemed clear from the beginning that Diane dominated the friendship. He was uneasy about it. It was Diane's example, if not something she'd said for all the difference that made that had prompted Mercy to think about what she would do if he should decide to divorce her. Mercy admitted it to him. "It happens," she said, 'it does happen to people. People you'd never expect it to. Diane said when she married Tommy and left Wisconsin-Madison to go to London with him, she never dreamed they'd ever break up. But by the time they got to UMass. she'd decided she'd better get her degree. She'd seen a couple of their friends get divorced, so she knew it did happen, and when it did the woman was a lot better off if she had something she could do.
She said that was what woke her up she didn't have any job skills. And even then it was almost too late he left for Chicago before she could finish up.
"If she hadn't been already enrolled in the program, so people knew her and got her financial help, she would've been sunk. She got enough alimony to live on, but not enough to pay tuition Without the help she would've had to drop out. Or else take a lot longer getting her degree. So it's a lot better, safer, to make sure that you're prepared. It may never happen; it'll probably never happen. But it's good to be prepared all the same. And anyway, what'm I supposed to do when Emmy and Timmy've grown up and have their own lives? I need to have a life too. A real job to go to, which I've never had. So even though I know of course I'd never divorce you I could never love anyone else I still want to have something to do.
"And I also know even though I'd never leave you, divorce isn't out of the question. A lot of your time's spent away from home, with interesting, exciting people. Doing interesting, exciting things. And more and more of them these days, are interesting and exciting young women, in the careers they're in because they're very goodlooking young women. And smart. I know you're always saying TV reporters are just pretty faces and hairdos, don't have a brain in their heads. Well excuse me, but I don't believe that. A lot of these women are smart.
That's how they got those jobs, by being smart enough to know how to capitalize on their looks to get a job that pays them more in a year than I've earned in my whole entire life.
"Some day one of those little cuties could decide she'd like to be the wife of a bright young and handsome politician who might be going places. And decide to make a play for you. Get rid of the wife and move in. Think you'd fall for it, darling?" she said.
"No, of course not," he said at once.
"Well that's nice to hear," she said, 'but I'm not sure I can be sure of that. You may not know the answer yourself. How you'd react if some woman put an effort into it, tried to lure you out of our bed into hers. And if you don't know how you'd react, as I don't want to think you do, I don't know, either, do I?"
By afternoon on the quiet Tuesday after his rancorous allegation of anti-Catholic prejudice at Grey Hills Sunday night, Hilhard in his office at the State House had decided what to do to avenge it. He had called the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and amiably suggested the first stocking of the brook and the river that ran through Grey Hills. The man who took the call and recognized the name of the chairman of Ways and Means had been prudently indifferent to the fact that the stretches of the streams the caller proposed for improvement at taxpayer expense were privately owned, posted off-limits to nonmembers of Grey Hills. The stocking had begun. Delight among the membership who chanced to catch the hatchery trout and deduced their origin was immediate and unfeigned. Hilhard was not allowed to lie in wait; Warren Corey identified him at once as the member deserving the thanks. For the next several years, until mortality put an end to it, the anglers at Grey Hills at Corey's instigation annually held "The Fish Dinner," honoring Dan Hilhard as their benefactor. If they were dissembling, they did it well enough so that he was never able to detect it.
In the years since Hilhard had left the House, no one in the legislature or the governor's cabinet had found the cost of the stocking in the budget for Fisheries and Wildlife, so no one had made a second call to Fisheries and Wildlife threatening public denunciation of the practice as unauthorized and corruptly wasteful. The stocking continued.
"Hit another one, Steve," Julian Sanderson said in the August sunshine, too warmly and indulgently. "Yeah, you're among friends here, Steverino," Pete said heartily and expansively, 'mulligans all around, all day long."
Asshole, Merrion thought disinterestedly. To Hilliard he said: "There, see what I mean?"
Hilliard laughed, releasing his grip on Merrion's shoulders, along with a gust of Courvoisiered breath into the air around them, pulling a chair up at Merrion's left. He sat down: six-two, a hundred-and-eighty-or-ninety pounds, thickening softly around the middle; the black hair starting mostly grey over the ears; a grand smile on the slightly flushed face evincing years of practice but because of the practice showing as well the warm heart behind it and clasped his hands at his waist. "Diversion, Amby," he said. "Julian is for diversion. His mission's to be a guide for the world at play time."
In February of the 1982 election year Hilliard cheerfully endorsed Joseph Bryan, a House colleague, for the Democratic nomination for the largely ceremonial and thus lightly regarded office of lieutenant governor, then vacant. It was an automatic; Bryan had done many minor favors for Hilliard and was calling his chits.
In May the senior US senator with four years remaining on his term received bad news from his cardiologist: "I'm afraid the results of the angiogram don't look good, and you're too old for a transplant. Without one at your present pace you may last three years. For your family's sake as well as your own, you ought to consider retirement." Shaken, the senator had confided in his staff, and one of them, stupid or treacherous, had leaked it before the victim could collect his wits and plan his succession.
The governor, a shoo-in for re-election, had long coveted a senate seat. It was apparent that the senator would defer his resignation until after the general election so that the governor, a friend, could appoint himself to fill the vacancy. The next lieutenant governor would succeed him. Suddenly Bryan had two strong competitors. Each of them had done several very important favors for Hilliard. Each of them sought his support. Matters became complicated.
Merrion one night about a week before the '82 primaries was in a motel bar in Worcester with several reporters, among them Charlie Doyle.
Charlie's facial skin had folds as deep as those in the hides of bulldogs, and the silver sweaty stubble in the crevices glistened in the light when he changed expression -as he did with admiration, talking about Hilliard. Charlie said that as long as he'd been around the game, 'and that is one long fuckin' time," he'd never seen anyone who could duck a question better than Dan Hilliard.
"I collared him this afternoon and asked him how he stands now on the lieutenant governor thing: is he still with Bryan? If you'd been standing here beside me you'd've sworn he's answering it -I know I thought he was. He wasn't.
"He may be the best I've ever seen, it comes to slinging it. He will not lie to you at least so you could prove it. He does not refuse to answer, and he doesn't whine and plead. "Oh gee, you can't ask me to do that." Stuffs beneath him. You stop him and you say: "Hey Dan." He says: "Hey Charlie," and that's how it begins. He stands there and talks to you, and twenty minutes go by in the twinkling of an eye he doesn't seem to stop for breath.
"You just can't help but be impressed, even thankful, all this time he's giving you. And he's so earnest about it. When he gets through doing it, he's just as fresh as springtime, and you're totally worn out. And furthermore, what's more important, you don't know a single thing you didn't know before. You may know even less. At least until this afternoon, I knew he was still with Bryan.
"Now I'm not sure of that. I've had the Hilliard Treatment, and boy, do I feel good, like a million bucks, Dan Hilliard's been so good to me. When you feel like you've just had sex you've had the Hilliard Treatment. Yes, my child, you have been fucked, but it's really not so bad you've been fucked so very well. That's why all us whores like Danny; he's what makes the job worthwhile. We let him have his way with us, anytime he likes, 'cause we have a good time too."
Then Charlie Doyle had smiled. "That's how he does the magic tricks.
He gets you to help him. You don't even realize it. You went in as his adversary: this time you're gonna smoke him out, once and for fuckin' all. But before you even know it, you've become a volunteer from the audience, right beside him in the footlights, grinning like a fool.
"You know what I bet?" Charlie'd said. "I bet he's always like this now, he's so good at it. He's with the wife and kids, and one of them says to him "Daddy, can I have an ice cream cone?" He does the same song-and-dance he does for you and me, everyone he deals with, face-to-face and day-to-day. By the time he's through, the little kid has either gone to sleep, or lost all interest in the fuckin' ice cream cone. Grown up, gone off to school."
"Julian's one of those people," Hilliard said on the patio, 'that you go to when you really don't have enough on your mind. You give him money to relax you. Julian's very relaxing. He's in charge of fixing things that don't need fixing, and really don't have to work right anyway. Like golf. You do not have to play golf, much less play golf well. Golf is an option, nothing more. The problems it creates for those who get problems from it are volitional. The only reason they exist is because we wish them to. Julian solves those problems."
Julian's third client hit his drive straight down the fairway with a nice loft on it, but it traveled no more than 150 yards, down to the first little hollow. He appeared to have sacrificed distance for accuracy. Julian cleared his throat and said: "Nice and true, Paul, nice and true. Need some more oomph on it, though. Little more meat in it."
"Gotta get the old ass into it, Paul," Julian's first client said, still gloating over his drive as he got into the cart with Steve.
Merrion hoped idly the gods of golf would punish Pete severely for the rest of the day.
"Julian's optional, too," Hilliard said.
"Yeah, yeah, where the hell've you been?" Merrion said, looking at his watch. "It's twenty after and the message that you left on my machine yesterday said our tee-time was eleven-thirty. Fuck've you been all this time?"
"I was over at the house in Bell Woods," Hilliard said.
"You were over the house in Bell Woods," Merrion said. "What the hell're you doing Bell Woods? Fourteen years, you haven't lived inna place? You forget all a sudden who owns it?"
"Mercy called up from the Vineyard this morning," Hilliard said. Under the terms of the property settlement agreement Daniel and Marcia (Hackett) Hilliard had in his words 'fairly rationally reached, meaning not too much blood was let' negotiating their divorce, they retained joint ownership of the house at West Chop, the survivor of them to enjoy a tenancy for life, at his or her death the remainder of the estate to be sold and the proceeds evenly divided between Timothy and Emily Hilliard. Mercy got occupancy during August, which both of them preferred; he had the run of it from Memorial Day through the last Saturday in July.
"She gets the part she calls "the hurricane season, when it's so crowded you can't move, horribly crowded, and so hot you can't do anything." Says it proves she got screwed on the deal. I say what she got's "the best part of the summer, when it's nice and warm and everyone you want to see is there," he said. "Of course it isn't crowded when I'm there; no one who's got any sense goes there in June.
July; they wait 'til August. The sun and the Gulf Stream don't warm up the water enough to swim in until around the end of July, so all of us who go there before that either stay out of the water or freeze our balls off."
She had gotten the main house in Bell Woods estates in Hampton Pond.
"When Nick Hardigrew was still alive, he had a key to the house. I think he found out how to get into something else over there too, but who'm I to make remarks? Nobody is. Hell, one of our English teachers, queer as a green horse but funny as hell; three or four of us were talking the other day about how all of us like western movies and nobody makes them anymore, and he says he even likes westerns. And somebody said: "Really? You guys like westerns?" And he says: "Oh, yes, absolutely, faggots love westerns. Especially the Lone Ranger.
Man with a mask on; so he goes on top. And Tonto: Such a hunk. If he'd only take his shirt off. Really he is such a dream. And once you know Kemo sabe means "Snookums," I mean, how could anyone ever resist?"
Everyone's got something going."
"Anyway, Mercy didn't give a key to this new lawn guy she's got now.
Told me she hasn't known him long enough yet to be sure she can trust him. So he was over there this morning and he called her and said he thought he heard water running inside, sounded like down in the cellar.
Somebody had to go over, go in and look at it, maybe get a repairman.
Tim's in Singapore with his new bride, seems to have a little better disposition than his old one did; showing her the assembly plants he runs from his office in Stamford, twelve thousand miles away. Emily's teaching summer session down in Santa Fe."
Hilliard had not lingered conversationally over his surviving daughter's living arrangements since she and a female collegue at Smith had purchased a showpiece antique farmhouse in Worthington. Since Merrion's policy was to welcome and honor personal confidences but never seek such information, he did not know whether they remained on the speaking but distant terms Hilliard had salvaged by groveling for his daughter during the publicly colorful passage of the break-up of his marriage.
In those days, to Emily's explicit disapproval, he had been frequently described in the papers as 'debonair chairman of Ways and Means' and 'man about Hill and town." The Herald called him "Dancing Dan' in the caption of a photo of him in swim trunks, surrounded by three smiling bimbos each with 'more cleavage'n Grand Canyon," Merrion told him dolefully by phone reclining on a beach chair with the ocean in the foreground and St. Thomas in the background, during a February blizzard in New England, Fred Dillinger in his Transcript column called him 'our own sunshine-lover, Dapper Dan Hilliard playing patty-cake while we all shovel."
He seemed then to be determined the parade of young women he was photographed escorting through his life would never end, one after another lissome lady in her twenties smiling at the camera with many white teeth and displaying long shiny hair, generally blonde, their large bosoms and long legs exposed to vulgar eyes and lewd speculation by microscopic dresses and 'wide belts instead of skirts." But in time the fun did end when he resigned his seat in the House in '84, four months ahead of impending electoral disaster, to become at age fifty president at Hampton Pond Community College.
He told Merrion that Emily had congratulated him on his appointment, saying she was happy because she figured he was 'finally getting tired of acting like the biggest asshole in the world." Because Hilliard was his best friend and Emily was not, Merrion did not say what he thought: that most people who knew and liked her father had for a while sadly and reluctantly shared her opinion.
All that had been several years before Emily at age thirty-one and her partner, Karen, thirty-eight, had decided to make public their commitment to each other in a meadow setting, inviting the papers. The Pioneer Valley Record, a weekly in Cumberland, ran two pictures;
Hilliard did not appear in them because he had not attended the ceremony.
"I was not invited," he told Merrion. "I chose not to be. Emily called me up and told me what was going to happen. She said she'd invited her mother and Mercy'd gotten all bent out of shape and begged her not to go through with it. Pleaded with her to be satisfied with living openly with Karen, if that's what she was sure she wanted to do.
No one was trying to stop them, so why go public and cause the rest of us all this pain and embarrassment. Emily said Mercy should have joy, not that negative reaction, that she's found her life's companion and partner, and celebrate their union, and that just shows how insensitive we are to her real needs.
"Emily told me her mother's reaction made her think she'd better call me up and ask me whether I wanted to come, or would I rather try to make her feel bad instead, like her mother had just done. So she was asking did I want to be invited, and she would like to have my true and honest answer.
"Remember the big kid in the sixth grade with you he'd been kept back so many times they had to let him out of gym so he could go and vote?
Used to stick his chin out and ask you if you were trying to start a fight at recess poke you in the chest before he hit you in the guts?
Same tone of voice.
"I thought about the way she acted when Mercy and I were having such a grand old time of it kicking the living shit out of each other when we were breaking up. Emmy's contribution then was to make it worse for both of us by acting like she's the one who's getting hurt, squawking at me about all the bad publicity I was getting as though I'd been out there trying to get it."
"I don't remember you working too hard to avoid it," Merrion said.
"No," Hilliard said, his voice roughening, "I didn't. I stopped living a monk like Sam Evans said after Mercy alleged adultery. The hell was the point of celibacy after that? Sit around and beat my meat after I've been publicly accused of getting laid three times a day? But I didn't go out and arrange the damned press coverage, which is what Emily's doing. She's deliberately staging this sideshow so it'll be in all the papers that she's a lesbian. Part of my job's enforcing college rules that say no public sexual conduct or display. And I've actually got people on my campus who say that's violation of academic freedom. So now Emily's very sweetly asking me if I wouldn't love to be a part of her little pagan feast.
"I gave it some thought. "Which'd I rather do: what my dear daughter's offering here or jump into a live volcano?" I decided I'd prefer the volcano. This isn't a celebration she's planning; this is a counterattack. No reason to stand out in front of it. So I said: "Uh uh, no thanks. Appreciate the call though. Lots of luck to you and Karen. Toodle-ooh." And that's the way we left it.
"So, who did that leave with a key around here? You're looking at him.
Hot-water heater tank blew a relief valve. I got Ralph Stallings to fix it this morning, actually come out on a Saturday, but I had to be there, let him in. Then wait around while he fixed it; lock up again after he left."
"You still got a key?" Merrion said.
"Yeah," Hilliard said. "I didn't realize it either, not for quite a long time. I first found out I still had it I dunno when it was, five, six years ago, same situation. Somebody was going to go there to do something, install something, I dunno, and that was the only day they could come and she'd been waiting a long time have it done. But it so happened she had to be someplace else that same day, so would I be a nice guy and do her a favor and go over there, let him in. I was kind of surprised myself. It wasn't like I minded or anything, I'm only just up the street and let's face it, I pretty much come and go as I like. So it was no big deal.
"But when she first called up and asked me, did I still have my key; I admit I was kind of surprised. I said: "Yeah, I think I might still have it around here someplace; I don't think I threw it away. Why?"
And she told me, and I said: "Well, geez, you know, the reason I'm not sure I've got it is I assumed it wasn't any good anymore. Isn't it sort of traditional, part of the ritual, that when the wife winds up with the house, she gets all the locks changed?"
"And she said yeah, she guessed it was, but one thing and another, she never got around to it. The kids when we split up, they were still living there. Later on, they're in college, they still had to have a place to come back to. After that Tim's first marriage came apart; he lived here until he got resettled. Emmy was sort of between jobs and up in the air for a long time, figuring out what she was. So they both would've needed new keys if Mercy'd gotten the locks changed.
'"It just seemed simpler," she said to me, "if I left things the way they were. And it wasn't as though, you know, I was ever afraid of you. I never considered myself a prospect for one of those afternoon talk-shows: "Women whose ex-husbands stalk them." I never went to bed at night thinking maybe you might be looking in the windows; I never thought you'd ever want to hurt me. Not in that way, anyway."
Hilliard smirked. "My little Mercy, just as sweet as ever always gets her little dig in.
'"And anyway," she says, "everybody that I know who's got a house, ex-husband or no ex-husband around, they've all got someone who doesn't live there that's got a key to it. In case someone needs to get in while they're gone, the fire department or something. Someone they can trust. Well, you're ideal far as that kind of trust's concerned anyway. You live right near me; I know if I fall down some night, break my leg or something and can't move, if I can call an ambulance I can get you up and you'll come over, let the paramedics in. And when I'm on the island, you're usually here. So I just never got around to it."
"So anyway, that's where I was," Hilliard said. "Waiting for Ralph Stallings to come. And finish his work and then go. Sorry to've kept you waiting."
"So, are we playing?" Merrion said, catching another whiff of cognac, thinking: Mercy's still stocking the bar in the study with V.S.O.P.
"I called Bolo up this morning," Hilliard said, 'after I called your house first and I got your machine. That to me says you'd either left already to come here or were on the road to God-knows-where-else first, and then you're coming here. Or else that you got lucky last night and you haven't been home, and as soon as you two get through hiding the salami a few more times with last night's catch-of-the-day, you're coming directly here. I didn't have your car-phone. So I called Bolo and told him the situation. So when you got here and came looking for me, tell you what's going on, ask you to wait; I'm on my way. Bolo said when I got here to find him and he'd fit us in whenever we wanted.
I take it you didn't bother, see Bolo."
"No point in it," Merrion said. "Your car wasn't in the lot when I got here. Obviously you're not here. I changed my clothes and come out here. Obviously also, something's going on, which so far I don't know about, but probably will when you finally get here. So I'll sit here and wait, watch Heck's baffling kid for a while. You've known me a long time, Daniel my friend. I'm the patient sort, not a guy who craves excitement. I'm more the type who likes to sit back, take his time and see how things develop. Hell, I out waited Larry Lane and Richie Hammond, both; so far that's worked out pretty well."
Hilliard snickered. There was no happiness in it. "Well, yeah, up 'til now it seems to've," he said. "Like the guy who fell off the roof forty stories up: when someone yelled from the twentieth floor he was gonna get killed, he said: "Oh I dunno; so far now it's been all right." I'm just not so sure how much longer." '"How much longer" what?" Merrion said.
"How much longer things stay okay," Hilliard said. "I'm beginning to think time isn't always on your side. You can't always count on it being that way, time's always working for you. Stands to reason that sometimes it has to work the other way, right, in favor of somebody else. And therefore work against you.
"You shouldn't let yourself become too sure of things. They've got a way of turning on you in a flash and taking a big bite out of you.
Things don't always stay the same, the way we're used to and they've always been. At least that's what I'm starting to think. This could be a true fact; that we may be starting to find out what we've got on our hands now may not be something we're used to. And wed be a whole lot better off if we came to grips with it right off, started dealing with it. Things may now be very different. I think maybe we have to realize that."
He paused and moistened his lips, gazing at Merrion as though expecting him to say something. Merrion frowned and shook his head. He said nothing.
Hilliard cleared his throat. "Well, ah," he said 'one reason I'm late … well, the reason I'm late is the reason I told you. I hadda go over Bell Woods. But I wasn't sorry, it made me be late. It gave me some time to think. I'm seeing some stuff going on that I'm not sure I like. And I'm not sure what we do about it. I wanted to think, before I saw you, about what it is that we should do about this shit."
"Dan," Merrion said, 'you're making me nervous here. I'm starting to get very nervous."
"Yeah, I know what you mean," Hilliard said, looking worried and licking his lips. "That's what I mean, I was trying to say. I'm a little uneasy myself."