"I doubt Larry Lane'd recognize the clerk's job you described to me,"
Hilliard said in the High Street office, a week deeper into the spring of '66. "If he did, he'd never admit it. My guess is he'd tell you he's never seen one like it in Canterbury. Mere suggestion'd give him palpitations."
"He's making trouble?" Merrion said. "Who's he think he is, chief clerk or something?"
"I haven't talked to him directly," Hilliard said. "I saw Chassy Spring at the spring Hampden County Bar Association hoedown over at the old Worthy. I thought it might be a good chance to sort of sound him out about having you come in. He was not enthusiastic. He said he wouldn't stand in the way if I told him that's what I wanted, but he also said Lane hasn't given him any indication his two-man staffs overworked."
"There's a job open, though," Merrion said. "Like I said: I already checked that out, long time ago. Canterbury's authorized for three, three assistant clerks, Chapter Two-eighteen, Section Ten. There's only two there now, two assistant clerks so that means they need one more."
"Well," Hilliard said, "I'm not sure that follows. They may have room for one more, but that doesn't mean they need one. Maybe Lane's a thrifty manager, conscientious public servant, saving a dollar or two the taxpayers' money here and there if he can, and he finds he can get by with two assistants. One of whom, incidentally, Spring says Lane doesn't like at all. Some protege of Roy Carnes's; Hammond, I think his name is. But what if we brace Lane and he says two assistants're a quorum? What do we do then?"
"Since when did that ever matter?" Merrion said. "When a chairman on Counties not to mention mine's also on Ways and Means and Judiciary too has a friend and the buddy wants a job and the job he wants is open, when did it ever matter whether anyone else wanted it filled? Even if the guy dragging his feet was the guy in charge the office when did that start to matter?"
"Oh, I couldn't give you the original example," Hilliard said, 'but I can tell you what the situation probably was. The guy in charge didn't want the vacancy filled. From the outside you never know what's going on inside courthouses. The people who're in them think of them as their private domains. Statute may say there's room for someone new, but that'll mean that someone they don't know'll then be learning all their business. Maybe they've got something going on they don't want publicized.
"Or someone in the courthouse, the judge or the clerk himself, is saving the slot until someone gets out of the army or finishes school.
Or the clerk reaches retirement age, which'll mean the guy he's hand-picked to succeed him'll be free to hire two new assistants. One of them being actually qualified; the other one being the retiring guy's bastard child by the fence-viewer's wife.
"You get the idea: one of the new guys would be someone he could not appoint himself, because it might not've looked right. Might've smacked of nepotism, started no end of loose talk -but if the guy succeeding him's the guy making the appointment, then it'll be perfectly kosher. The incoming chief clerk signs the bastard's paper, in order to get his own job.
"That's very often what the situation is, we find," Hilliard said. "And as soon as the Counties chairman sees that's what it is, the maximum heat he or anybody else outside the governor, of course can put on the guy who's set up the swap drops about fifty degrees. Technically, yeah, the chairman could probably make a demand; plant his feet and say "I want this done and I want it done now, and until it is you get no funding." He could do it once. But he'd be a fool if he did. He'd have to know once he's thrown his weight around like that, he'll never get anything else. He represents a client there, he'll have to wear a bulletproof-vest to make a safe trip to the bathroom.
"People don't like guys who threaten them. You put yourself in a position where you've got to be able to get a guy's job if he doesn't do what you want, you're not going to get many things done. You think you can get a clerk fired if he wont lose a ticket for you? Not likely. And even if you could, there'd still be a limit on how many guys you could get fired before you made enough people mad enough at you to get together and see if they couldn't get you. People rebelling like that, pretty soon you can't get anything done. All you've got're guys chasin' around, rantin' and ravin' all over the place, trying to pay off their grudges. That's counterproductive. You want things to be the way most people like them: everything peaceful, and calm.
"The system depends on nobody's toes getting stepped-on. Everyone gets what he wants. It begins to look like there may not be enough jobs to go so that everyone who wants someone to get one can get taken care of; well then, what we do is get together and we talk. See if maybe we can work something out. Chances are we can see our way clear to agree that the money can be found, if we all look hard enough, and therefore we can go ahead and create a few more of those very popular jobs.
"To be given, of course, only to people who'll be grateful after they get them: don't leave that out. Because in the future there's probably going to be a way for them to express their thanks that they are without makin' a lot of fuckin' noise and commotion about doin' it. By maybe holding a slot for us when two or three open up in their office.
It's more beneficial for everyone that way, everyone getting along."
"Yeah," Merrion said. "Well, okay, but I don't think that's what's going on in the Canterbury court-clerk's office now, that's short one clerk. Judge Spring; you told me once he's got two kids, and both of them're now big high-powered lawyers someplace. One is down in Boston and the other's someplace else?"
"Right," Hilliard said. "One of Chassy's boys, I forget the kid's name now, but I know he's very large in one of the big firms in Boston. The other one, I think, went to New York very high up in the financial world, some outfit that underwrites bonds. Both making about a ton of money; bucks coming in hand over fist."
"So they're outta my picture," Merrion said. "They're not leavin' jobs like that to come back here and take this job I want they're both fryin' much bigger fish."
"That seems about right," Hilliard said. He smiled. "Be interesting to know how Chass really feels about that: both of his kids doing so well. Proud, of course, naturally; you'd assume that. But maybe kind of envious too? That maybe if he'd done something like that himself; gone out into the big world and made a huge mark of his own. Instead he plays it safe and comes back here; practices law, sends out calendars and Christmas cards every year, until the finale, he becomes the judge next town over. This's not what you call your big finish.
Got to ask yourself: Is this guy content? Was this really what he wanted out of life? Maybe; wouldn't've been my choice.
"I think about that. People who catch my attention for some reason, I begin to wonder how they feel about the way their lives turned out. If they think they made the right decisions. How the bad ones hurt them.
How far they've come; how far they could've gotten if they'd been a little smarter, had a little better luck. Are they happy now; or are they disappointed? How I'll feel some day when I'm their age and now I'm the one who's looking back and seeing how my decisions all turned out."
"Well, he's made himself a bunch of money, hasn't he?" Merrion said.
"Didn't you also tell me Chassy plays the market like Chuck Berry plays guitar? That oughta happy him some."
"Oh shit, yes," Hilliard said. "My father's the Spring family dentist.
Taken care of their teeth for years. Made a good many of them in fact;
Spring family's got very weak teeth. They've all needed bridgework and plates. He used to talk, they came in. He knew for a fact that Chassy'd made a huge amount of money, stocks and bonds and so forth.
That didn't bother my father; what did was that the judge never gave him a hot tip."
"Bastard," Merrion said.
"You'd think that, wouldn't you," Hilliard said. "Least the cocksucker could do, knows what stock is going up, is tell the people that he knows, so they could make some money too. Not everybody, no, just people that he sees around a lot like my father, for example, for his teeth. Not advising them, so you'd expect him to be calling them up every day or so and saying: "Psst, buy GM; sell Coca-Cola," anything like that. No, just that he'd at least have the common decency, he knows he's going to see them, like an appointment with my father, let them in on whatever he thinks might be looking especially good.
"Dad said it to him once when he had him in the chair. Said: "Tell me, Chassy, aren't you just the tiniest bit afraid now? Doesn't it make you nervous to be sitting helplessly here in the chair with a bib on, and me standing over you with this high-speed electric drill I'm about to shove into your mouth? I could hurt you with this thing, if I'm not careful. I should think you'd want to do everything within your power to make sure you're in my good graces so I'm going to do my best not to hurt you."
"Dad and Chassy were in high school together. Most of my father's patients're like that: people he's known all his life. So it's okay for him to talk to them that way, and they can talk that way to him.
"The judge opens his eyes he's like most people, my father says, closes his eyes so he can't see the drill or the needle sits up straight in the chair and he asks my father what the hell he's got on his mind. And Dad puts it to him: "People say you make a lot of money in the market.
I believe them. Mind telling me how come you never see your way clear to letting me in on the deal?"
"Judge sits back and closes his eyes again. "Don't mind at all," he says. "I've made some money in the market, as have many. I've also lost some money in the market, as many others have as well. All of my profits have come from investing my own money well, mine and Delia's.
I've risked it to increase it. When my risks have paid off, I've had profits, been happy. And when they haven't, I've had losses. Then I've been unhappy. I always try to buy stocks that are going to go up;
I can't claim I always succeed.
"If I recommend you buy a certain stock, and you do it and make money, you'll be happy. You may even call me up and thank me. But you'll expect to keep the profit as you should; it was your money that you risked. If you lose money, though, as you very well might, then you'll be unhappy. And even though of course I know you wont expect me to make good your loss, you certainly wont call me up and thank me. In fact you'll probably secretly blame me for your loss, because if I hadn't put it into your head to buy that stock, you wouldn't've lost your money.
"So, when I come in here for a filling after that, what you'll remember wont be that you solicited the recommendation that caused you to lose money it will be that you lost your money because you did something that I told you to do. And therefore you might decide that instead of trying very hard not to hurt me, or hurt me as little as possible, you wouldn't mind hurting me at all, because I made you lose your money. So it would probably be best for me if I found another dentist.
"I don't want to do that. You've been a good dentist. I've been coming to you for years. I've got you all trained. I'm too old now to break in a new one. I think much too highly of your dental skills to risk having to do that, by giving you market advice that makes it so I don't dare to come in here anymore.
"Now having said that I must warn you: If you hurt me now, and I decide you did it on purpose because I refused to make you rich, I'll have to have you arrested and put in jail for battery."
"My father told Chassy he thought his explanation sounded reasonable and he'd do his best not to hurt him with the drill. He said what he should've said at that point was that if Chassy didn't start paying his bills on time instead of making him wait ninety days, he'd have him arrested, judge or not, and thrown in jail as a deadbeat. Spring family always took their sweet time paying their dental bills. But he didn't. Basically my father likes Chassy all right; just doesn't like having to wait to get paid for fixing his teeth."
"Okay then," Merrion said, "Spring hasn't got a horse in this race.
Judge Cavanaugh: Has he got a family? I don't know."
"The Boy Judge," Hilliard said, chuckling. "Fuckin' Freddie Dillinger? That's what he called Lennie Cavanaugh, his appointment was first announced ever since then, too, every time he's been in the news.
It's really a wonder, nobody's ever horsewhipped Fred; just beat the old-fashioned shit out of him, some of the things he's put in that column Nineteen-fifty-nine that was, when Lennie got that job; remember because that was the year Mercy and I got married. He was pretty young, though not even thirty, I recall. So that'd make him now, what, thirty-five, thirty-six? Nah, no kid of his'd be old enough. Might have a relative out there someplace, though, who's had trouble dressing and feeding himself. We wouldn't know."
"Yeah, he could," Merrion said. "He could also have trouble digesting fried fatty foods and we wouldn't know that either. Look, I don't want to sit around with you and do our damnedest to dream up a hundred good reasons why I can't get this job. What I want to do is figure out how we can do the same thing for me that the two of us've done for so many other people, nowhere as deserving as I am: figure out some way so that I can get this job that's what I want to do."
"I'm sorry," Hilliard said. "I'm so used to doing what we do when we get a job-hunter in here, I guess I must've forgotten who I was talking to."
"Yeah," Merrion said. "Well, this one time I'll overlook it. I did what you said, got some background on Lane. Since according to you he seems to be the chief hurdle standing 'tween me and the job. He's got a whole bunch of kids, eight of them. But only two of them don't already have jobs, and both of them're married daughters that don't even live around here. One of them lives in Japan or some other place nobody ever heard of. Her husband's with the State Department. The other one's married to some guy who works for a paint company. All the others've got jobs."
"How'd you get this?" Hilliard said.
"Turns out my mother knows him," Merrion said. "His wife I guess isn't a very good cook. He gets all their pies and cookies from Slade's Bakery. You know the one I mean. Used to also be a cafeteria, back when we still had the trains coming through. Ma says he's a regular bear for the cookies, oatmeal raisin, chocolate chip. Goes through couple dozen a week, half a dozen or so at a time. Monday nights, Wednesday nights, then a dozen he comes in on Friday. Plus a loaf of the brown bread, for Saturday night I guess him and the wife have baked beans. He's never in a very big hurry, Ma says, always got plenty of time to chat. He calls her "Polly," like all her friends do, and she calls him "Mister Lane." Now."
"What'd she used to call him?" Hilliard said. '"Franklin Delano Roosevelt"?"
"She called him "Judge," Merrion said. "But then someone told her it was Chris; he was still living at home then, after I'd moved out that he's just the clerk. "He's not the judge. He doesn't decide anything."
"Her reaction was: "Well, what did I know, he was only the clerk?
Someone told me he worked at the courthouse. Who works at the courthouse, huh? Judges. How'm I supposed to know he wasn't one? I was never inside it, thank God none of my family was ever arrested. We always behaved ourselves. He certainly looked like a judge ought to look, always very well-dressed and so forth. Although come to think of it, kind of flashy, for a judge. But always a jacket and tie, winter, summer or fall; shoes always shined; a clean shirt and a hat, always a hat. A felt hat in the winter, straw hat in the summer. Nice camel-hair overcoat in the cold weather. Mister Lane is a very sharp dresser." '"Well," Chris tells her, "how he dresses doesn't count. It's what he does that counts. And all he does is file papers no one ever looks at, and collect the money for tickets. It's not like he can send you to jail. He don't amount to a piss hole inna snow."
"To your mother he said that?" Hilliard said. "Did your father rise up out of the grave and belt him one? Pat might've said piss hole out in back at Valley Ford, but never in front of her."
"Well, the general idea was all I meant," Merrion said. "I don't know what Chris actually said. He was just givin' the general idea. Which's what I'm trying to give to you here. I asked my mother about him. I think I can work for this guy. I think it'd work out all right. Not someone I would call, I was lookin' for a guy go out'n have a few with, no, but otherwise, I see no problem.
"And let's not get carried away with ourselves here, either, when we're discussing this thing. This job that Lane's got with nobody in it, it isn't that big a thing. "I get by on it": was what Dad used to call his job, and that's all this job is, too. I can get by on it. A steady check is what I want. I never had any ambition.
"My own mother'll tell you that, if I'm not careful. God knows she's told me enough she's always giving me that. "Second prize, the small change, the leftovers. You poor kid, you've simply got no ambition at all."
Merrion had listened many times while she low-rated him to others. "It just isn't in Ambrose's nature to put himself forward, you know? He's tall enough and strong enough and fat enough, too, God knows he should be, see the way he eats all the time. His father used to say he wasn't a bad athlete. Not that he was ever a real good athlete either that might've meant he'd stand out.
"Pat never seemed to mind, though. I think now it was because he never aimed too high himself. Pat was always careful not to make himself conspicuous. Get his name in the papers, so someone heard about him. I think he approved of that attitude Amby had. He said if Amby didn't watch out, wasn't careful, he'd get too good at something in school, and pretty soon he'd wind up going far away to some fine university or something. I used to think he didn't mean it; that was his way of pushing Amby, getting him to do something. But now I'm not so sure.
"He'd say Amby didn't want people to think he wanted something really good to happen: "Mustn't let 'em catch you aiming too high for anything in this world. You might get it. Then God only knows what could happen. People might not like you anymore. Say you went high-hat on them, something bad like that might happen. It's just not worth takin' the risk, you know?" After a while Pat had us all convinced, Chris and me and Amby both. "Chris's the one who's got his eye on the moon. What Ambrose wants is for people to like him, to be the hero's best friend, covers his backside for him. Never the hero himself."
Thirty years later Polly (Flavin) Merrion late that benign Saturday afternoon in August lay non compos mentis at age seventy-nine in the bed in the bright sunny room with southwestern exposure on a small enclosed patio overlooking a round pool with a tulip-shaped recirculattng fountain at St. Mary's on the Hilltop in West Springfield, picking at the hem on the lightweight white wool blanket, her sparse white hair neatly trimmed, set and combed, her faultless white skin clear and softly lotioned, a hint of color on her lips, her blue eyes 'as clear as Gilbey's gin," as her dear Pat had used to say, just to get her goat. It had been about three years since she'd heckled her oldest son.
"My own dear mother, Rose, now," Polly usually began, when giving him a roasting he understood it to be her way of bragging about him running on the first part of a manhattan as she had been one day in March of 1973 at a small luncheon that he'd thrown in the private dining room at Henry's Grist Mill. He'd invited about thirty people to celebrate his official promotion to first assistant clerk of the District Court of Western Hampshire (meaning: Clerk of Court-designate).
Clerk of Court Richie Hammond after stalling six months had at last formally appointed Merrion to his old slot under Larry Lane. Hammond had instinctively disliked Merrion from the first time they met, knowing on first sight he was a smart-ass. Ever since Larry Lane had died he had been forlornly hoping either that someone with more clout would become interested in the job Hammond knew that was unlikely; Dan Hilliard was in the most formidable years of his ascent or failing that, perhaps God in His wisdom and goodness would strike Merrion dead.
God had not.
Richie had stopped stalling after being credibly threatened with summary dismissal from his own place. The threat had come in the form of a menacing phone call placed by a deputy administrator in the Administrative Office of the District Court Department in Salem. He said that the chief judge had just gotten an upsetting call about the next year's judicial budget from the chairman of House Ways and Means.
The administrator had reported grimly that the chairman of Ways and Means appeared to be not only very angry but 'a very close personal friend of this Ambrose Merrion," as well, and asked Richie Hammond if he'd been aware of that fact. When Richie said he had been "Everybody out here knows they're asshole buddies; that's the only reason Merrion got the goddamned job he's got' the chief administrative clerk had said in a soft savage voice: "Then would you mind telling me, so I can tell the judge, who's practically beside himself with fucking curiosity I think it's curiosity; it may be something else exactly why the fuck it is he had to get the call he got and I have to make this call right now, to get you to do what any fucking asshole with the brain of a retarded pigeon would've known from on the first day what he'd better do right fucking off or get his fucking balk cut off? Or would you rather quit right now, and we'll give Merrion your job would you like that better?"
Hammond had soberly accepted Merrion's solemn invitation to attend the joyous luncheon, but to the surprise of neither of them suffered an attack of the Twenty-four-hour Convenient Grippe when the day for it arrived.
"When Rose was among us," Polly said, 'she had designs on my poor little Ambrose, and selfish ones at that. She'd always had it in her mind that if she ever had any sons of her own it'd be a good thing for her if one of them went into the priesthood. You know what they used to tell all the good Catholic mothers: "If you've a son a priest, your place in heaven's guaranteed." But she didn't have any, so that was a bit of a handicap for her, you see? In that respect, at least, she'd left a stone unturned.
"That was not her way at all, neglecting things. Of course she hadn't had any wayward sons, either, which'd also been known to've happened to perfectly good church-going Catholic mothers. No naughty boys she would've had to pray for, make novenas to Saint Jude for, the patron saint of the Impossible, and go and visit Sunday mornings down at the lock-up, or on Tuesdays and the weekends at county jail or something, like some unfortunate women she knew and don't think she ever let 'em forget it, either; not for one stinkin' minute did she ever do that.
"Those poor unfortunate creatures with those terrible crosses to bear, the poor things."
"But that still didn't give her one to bake the cookies for, and send down to the seminary, either, and she couldn't let herself forget that.
I don't think nuns counted in that bounty-hunt and they didn't take young ladies in the priesthood. If they had, I think she would've thought nothing of wrapping me up and sending me along, "see what you can do with this one. Not much to look at maybe, but good with pots and pans, and she knows how to do a wash. Send her back if it looks like she isn't going to work out for you." But the choice wasn't available.
"So you could see what she was thinking, the minute he was born and we knew he was a boy. She thought maybe Ambrose might become a priest, if she took a hand in it as she generally did everything that happened within a mile or two of her, and played her cards right, of course.
Wasn't his namesake a famous bishop? And a saint? The bishop who baptized Saint Augustine, by God? Well, didn't that tell you something? Meaning that if the vocation didn't come naturally to our little boy, if the Holy Ghost didn't give him a good bat on the head and tell him what he ought to do, well then, she might get involved herself in working out the matter. Since she was pretty sure she knew what would've been God's will, if He'd only just spent the time and taken the proper interest in it. If you know what I mean. Bashfulness was not a thing that troubled her.
"So for a while then, after Pat and I were first married and Amby'd come into the world after only the bare decent interval, there, I'm sure she had her eye on him. Not that I'd want you to think, for even one moment, that my dear mother Rose actually had a thing to be concerned about where getting into heaven was concerned. Far from it butter wouldn't've melted in her mouth, not in that one's. No, it was just that she was always one to believe that where salvation was concerned, you couldn't be too careful. If now a grandson was the closest she could come to meeting the requirements, well, that was the best she could do. Couldn't ask for more than that. At least 'til I told her I didn't think grandsons counted, met the tariff for admission to Jerusalem, the holy city, the same way that sons do. And so that more or less cut down her zeal.
"It really was all for the best. If Ambrose'd gone into the church, you know, none of you here in this room or even at this table would've ever heard of him at all. He'd most likely be the curate in a small parish 'way up in the State of Maine someplace, up there on the forty-fifth parallel, on the Canadian border. And he'd be perfectly happy, you know? Completely at peace with the world. My boy's a humble man."
"At least she didn't say the celibacy stuff would've been no trouble for you," Mary Pat Sweeney had said to him that night in the apartment he'd been renting then in Hampton Pond. "If she had then I'd've known for sure I'd come to the wrong funeral after all." Mary Pat had kept about a hundred-fifteen pounds in what seemed like constant merry motion back in those days, and not just in her office down in Springfield at Massachusetts Mutual, or at the evening and weekend county Democratic meetings, either.
Mary Pat was well-known far and wide "Oh sure, both ways, north and south, up and down the river," as she used to say herself, 'good-time Mary Pat' for being the one person that you had to sign up before you could be really sure that what you had in mind to do would be a success. Merrion admitted cheerfully that her reddish hair and greenish eyes were the sights he first looked for when he walked into a room, 'just like everybody else does. Everybody else."
She believed in realism, just as he and Dan did. While Sunny was around but stationed far away from home, he 'always seemed to get along real good with Mary Pat," as Polly said from time to time, with some insistent wistfulness, the closest that she ever came to declaring her preference for Mary Pat among his girlfriends that she'd met. That was fully close enough for him to implying her somewhat-less-than-full approval of then-Lieutenant later Captain Geraldine Keller, USAF. Mary Pat in those days without discussion understood and apparently accepted the fact that she was his second-best girl and probably always would be no more than that. She appeared to believe that the reason was timing: he'd met Sunny first, at UMass." and because he was a loyal man, Sunny would remain first as long as they lived. Many times without wishing Sunny any ill Mary Pat therefore sincerely and coolly wished her dead.
She excused such thoughts to the accuser in her mind with the mitigation that she never actually prayed for Keller's death. That would have been deliberate; she wasn't willing anything; she simply couldn't help thinking that it would have been much more convenient for her and better for Ambrose as well, if Sunny were to die young without any pain at all, peacefully, in her sleep.
Mary Pat further understood without being told that Merrion could stand it if she should happen to run into someone else who would replace him as first in her love (although she hadn't wanted the assurance, and would have summarily rejected it if he'd offered it). So except for that first fucking week in fucking July every god-damned fucking year, and all the other fucking times fucking Sunny came home on fucking leave again, goddammit, always unexpectedly because unwanted by Mary Pat she and Amby did have their good times.
It wasn't easy for her. Mary Pat said nothing to nobody about nothing, as she put it, but then she didn't have to; she turned up the volume on her desk radio whenever WHYN-AM played "Time Is on My Side," by the Rolling Stones, and everyone who knew and liked her including all the men, and she knew a lot of them, from her interest in politics also knew she played the waiting game. She was generally steadfast and obdurate, silent in receipt of truly well-meant good advice from friends including her boss, Carol, a peach, who was really good to her and mentioned it only once until they stopped giving it, content to eyebrow smart remarks. She did allow a rather dumpy woman in Agents Accounts named Priscilla, from Three Rivers, whom she didn't even like, to get away with saying one beautiful June day during lunch outside on the lawn that she was 'never sure if the reason Sweeney's cubicle's always filled with smoke's because of all those Winstons she smokes or if it's from that torch she carries."
Knowing immediately from the laughter that self-restraint had been a mistake, Mary had rectified it early the next month -when Sunny's annual July visit, now two weeks at the place in Falmouth Heights that Amby rented had her in an ugly mood anyway. During a lull in a department briefing about the company's upcoming autumn media campaign of suggestions for avoiding life-endangering, artery-clogging, sedentary obesity, Mary Pat murmured rather loudly to the person sitting next to her that the ads should feature Priscilla as national poster girl. "Show Priscilla linin' up a chocolate-frosted jelly doughnut," Mary Pat proposed, well aware that her husky voice carried, 'drawin' a bead on a cruller. That'd put the point across: Henry the Eighth' amp; slim down."
Then everything'd gone all wrong and come apart in May of 1973, when Sunny died in a hospital in Honolulu. The cause was severe head-trauma she had suffered when the rented Jeep CJ that she was driving rolled over and down a cliff in the aftermath of a three-car accident that killed another woman and injured four other people on a mountain road switchback during a blinding downpour. Merrion at first did not believe it. Stunned in his grief, he was badly surprised as well that Sunny had returned to Hawaii and he hadn't known about it. He had met her at the Royal Hawaiian she'd called it 'the big pink hotel on the beach, the one where everyone always goes once' for her previous energetic furlough four months before, and had assumed from its delights he'd be returning for the next one. The married major from Coronado, California, who'd flown from Tan Son Nhut to Hawaii with her for ten days of R amp;R, when he recovered consciousness gave police a statement proving conclusively the crash had not been Sunny's fault. Somehow that post mortem exoneration hadn't seemed to help Merrion feel better at all.
That fact had not been lost on Mary Pat. Heedlessly leaving her desk at mid-morning as soon as she'd heard the news, putting off the explanation to another day no one in her office ever asked her for it later she had gone at once to his place to make stiff drinks and get in bed to give him a lover's help. She had arrived there knowing she thought: instinctively, without possibility of error he needed to have that done. It had always seemed to him afterwards that both of them had realized about ten seconds before she'd really begun trying to console him, it was never going to work.
Neither one of them had ever gotten over it. After a few more perfunctory, good-buddy, make-believe tries at making him feel better she'd decided on her own to give it up. While in one corner of his mind he believed she'd never found it getting any easier to do, she'd started saying No without excuse or explanation every time he called, and she had stuck to it. After a while he'd given up too, and rather gratefully stopped making the calls.
That August Saturday waiting for Hilliard at Grey Hills the most recent time he'd seen her had been by chance at a dinner-dance at the Sheraton Hartford hotel in '92 or '93, benefit for the family of a high-spirited, hail-fellow lawyer they had known from Seventies-early-Eighties New England Democratic politics. Disbarred and disgraced after having lived very graciously for many years on money he had not, after all, earned from representing a few extremely wealthy and secretive clients, as he had always seemed to claim.
Instead he had stolen systematically and routinely from a couple dozen estates left by fairly prosperous clients whose heirs had trusted him, taking what he'd wanted as boldly as if it had been his. Caught, he had avoided criminal prosecution, certain conviction and plenty of jail by stripping his own estate as ruthlessly as he'd plundered his late clients' accumulations. The sale of everything he owned at distress prices, beggaring his still-young family, combined with the proceeds of his malpractice insurance policy amounted to enough to constitute ostentatious restitution of eighty-four percent of what he had stolen. He was sentenced to five years in jail, two of them to be served, three suspended for ten years.
Granted thirty days to finish putting his affairs in order before starting to serve his sentence, he had needed only two to complete his liquidation by shooting himself in the head.
"Well, no one ever said Mickey wasn't thorough," Mary Pat said, encountering Merrion at the bar. She still smoked the Winstons and weighed around the same trim one-fifteen, but she was dressing and decorating it a lot better. Merrion told her she looked like a million bucks. "Yeah," she said, satisfaction in that smoky voice, 'and even nicer, now I've got it."
"Hit the lottery?" he said. "Lucky you."
She grinned and shook her head. "Can't count on luck," she said.
"Luck's not dependable, and as you know, mine's never been all that good. Stock market's much more reliable. Skill and smarts still count there, which is good. Helps if you clank when you walk, but it's really not all that complicated. You quit spending all your time partying around; start staying home and paying attention to what the rich people say."
"You have rich friends now?" Merrion said.
"Well," she said, "I have a rich friend. He takes me where rich people go; I get close enough to listen."
He hadn't asked her the next question because he'd known the answer.
She'd delivered it anyway, shaking her head. He played dumb, smiled back and said: "I'm missing something here, am I?"
She'd shaken her head once more. "Probably nothing that ever really interested you that much," she said. "Funny how things seem to change, after time's gone by."
"What is it that seems to have changed on us here, all of a sudden and all?" Merrion said to Hilliard on the terrace at Grey Hills, that Saturday in August.
Hilliard frowned and leaned forward in his chair. He rested his elbows on its arms and scraped it on the flagstones up against the table. "I think," he said slowly, frowning, '1 think… well, lemme put it this way: what I think is, anyway… I…"
"Well, this is reassuring," Merrion said. "If you're doing that."
"You had some doubt in your mind, maybe?" Hilliard said, looking up from under his eyebrows.
"I was beginning to get a little concerned, yeah," Merrion said. "I was beginning to wonder if maybe instead of asking you to explain Julian to me, I should ask Julian about you. Or maybe get Janet back in and put a different question to her. "What's the meaning of life, huh Janet? You got a handle on this?"
"Yeah," Hilliard said. "Well, look, whyn't we do this now, then, all right? Let's you and me just go inside and get a bite to eat, cheeseburger, something, a bottle of beer, talk it over in there, and see what we do about this. Would that be all right with you? Then, after that, play a round. Or maybe just nine holes or something."
"Fuck going inside," Merrion said. "Tell me here what you think's going on."
"I don't know," Hilliard said. "I heard things I don't like, but I'm not sure… Look, you gotta remember Bob Pooler."
"Remember and hate the fucker," Merrion said.
"Yeah, well, still," Hilliard said. "I think you should go, you know, talk to the guy, and see what he thinks about this. See what he's got to say."
"Hear what the little prick's got to say about what?" Merrion said.
"What could that little shit possibly have to say that could possibly interest me?"
"Well," Hilliard said slowly, "I'm not exactly sure myself yet what the broad outlines of this might be, but what it seems to be is this: he thinks they may be thinking, the federal boys in Boston, about maybe starting up grand jury hearings out this way, down in Springfield, I mean, and if they decide to do that then they might be… well, you know what I'm saying, right? Might be coming after me."
"Which of course would have to mean, then," Merrion said thoughtfully, 'also after me."
Hilliard frowned and cleared his throat, "Yeah," he said. "Well, after us. That would be the gist of it. After you and me."
The police station in Canterbury was the second-largest structure to be built in the new municipal complex, four buildings clustered on Holyoke Street a block north of the green. The town offices opened in 1981.
The police station was completed in February of 1982. The largest building, the new fire station, and the public library were finished in April of 1983, during Hilliard's eleventh and last term in the House.
Because he had been instrumental in the enactment of 1980 legislation granting $6.7 million in state aid to the town for the construction, the selectmen felt they had no choice but to invite him to be the keynote speaker at the dedication of the buildings as the Veterans'
Memorial Municipal Center on the afternoon of Memorial Day of 1983.
It was not a popular decision. Many who had voted for him several times now severely disapproved of him and said they would never support him again, generating considerable and vehement negative advance comment. He thought he heard someone boo when he took the lectern, but he soon made his audience feel better, using the occasion to announce to the audience of sixty-three seated on metal folding chairs before him on the broad front walk that he would not be a candidate for re-election in 1984Several women applauded vigorously, nodding for emphasis, saying "Good," and "Well, you shouldn't," giving their husbands meaningful looks; one or two even cried "Yea," in ladylike fashion.
He declined to divulge his plans. "You do," Merrion said, 'and all you do is egg them on, whet their appetites. All they want is to see you humiliated, punished for the way you treated Mercy.
Okay, let 'em have what they want. Put your tail between your legs and look sheepish; tell 'em you're not gonna run. Cringe like a dog that's been beaten a lot. Try to cower a little I realize you're outta practice, but do the best you can. That'll make 'em all feel superior and virtuous; like they've upheld the sanctity of marriage and the family, driving you out of office. You do some public penance, it wont be as much as you deserve, but it'll be enough. They'll be satisfied, forget about you and go on; find some other poor bastard to make life miserable for.
"They start thinkin' you're getting' away with something, pretendin' to be humble but sneakin' away to something even better this soft job that you invented they're liable say: "Oh no you don't; none of that shit, there. Givin' up the rep seat, pays fifty grand a year, 'cause he's been a naughty boy, and that gets him a better job, he pulls down eighty grand? Uh uh, we're not lettin' him do that."
"They'll find out if I don't announce it," Hilliard said. "Someone will've leaked it, time I make the speech. If they want to raise a stink and try to block it, they will. It'll all amount to the same thing."
"No, it wont," Merrion said. "If someone else tells 'em, that's all it'll be: something that someone else said. But if you announce it, they'll think you're laughing at them, gloating. To them it'll sound like this: "Okay, you hypocrites, I am convinced. If I run again you'll kick my ass. Well, up yours; I'm not giving you the chance. I'm not gonna let you dump me. And, I got something much better cooked up.
Pays even more and you'll never be able to vote me out of it, no matter how much I get laid. Doesn't that frost your balls, folks?"
"You know what they'll do then?" Merrion said. "They will lynch you.
If they decide you're not repenting; that you're giving them the finger, they will hang you by your fuckin' neck. They'll come to your condo and they'll drag you out the cellar where you hid and they'll march you down to Holyoke they'll have a band and everything, put on a torch-light parade. And when they get to Hampden Park they'll tie your hands behind you and rope your feet together and loop a noose around your neck. They'll make you stand on the roof of your Murr-say-deez-Benz and they'll throw the other end of the rope over the branch of a tree and tie it down good and tight to the tree trunk. And then before someone backs the car out from under you, they'll have a butcher climb up on the hood, yank your dick out of your pants and chop it off with his cleaver, and hold it up for all to see, while the bishop gives his blessing and leads the crowd singing "God Bless America."
"So I gather you don't think it would be a good idea for me to say what my plans are," Hilliard said.
"That would be the gist of it," Merrion said.
Reports of the address at the dedication said "Hilliard appeared subdued." An editorial paragraph in the Springfield Union reported that 'to many there, the personable and forceful chairman seemed chastened, no doubt by the strong public reaction to recent disclosures of his untidy personal life, almost certainly the principal reason behind his prudent decision to leave elective office." As Hilliard had predicted, the reports did include informed speculation that he expected to be 'appointed president of the community college in Hampton Pond, scheduled to formally open next year, although at first offering only night courses at the Pioneer Regional School during hours when it would normally be unused," but Merrion had also been right: no public outcry followed.
Freddie Dillinger in his Transcript column seemed a bit subdued himself. He was content to sneer, writing that the scheduled summer '84 completion of construction of the first of three new buildings planned for the HPCC campus 'will make the Hilliard Hilton the most modern shamelessly lavish, many have said -layout in the Commonwealth's entire community college system. The throne room, palmed-off in main-building blueprints as the presidential office suite, will be spacious enough for Dapper Dan to host a full-blown consistory, should the College of Cardinals ever stop by Hampton Pond and need a meeting-place. Assuming the prelates are on speaking terms with him after his pending divorce, seen by many as the catalyst for his career move." But Dillinger also seemed saddened by the prospect of Hilliard's departure from active politics. "I have no trouble saying that I've always liked Dan Hilliard. He's given us a lot of laughs, although not always intentionally, and in this often-gloomy world it's hard not to like a man who's so often brought you laughter."
"Praise from Caesar is praise indeed," Hilliard said to Merrion.
"Imagine the cocksucker getting emotional? Probably had to wipe away a tear. How insensitive I've been: All these years I've been reading the guy without ever guessing he liked me." He snorted. "Freddie must think the old saying's a commandment: Each man kills the thing he loves. Does his best to, anyway."
"I think we should give him a present," Merrion said. "How about we make a blivit, nice big bag full of fresh, soft dogshit, with a brick in it, throw it through his window on his desk."
The run-up to the withdrawal began in the spring of 1980. When Hilliard figured in newsworthy events, the identifier in the papers gradually changed; "Powerful Ways and Means Chairman' became "Embattled Chairman."
"I used to love it when they did that," he mourned to his friends, 'called me "powerful." He had begun to depend on them heavily for companionship. Weekends bothered him badly; drinks and dinner among 'my pals' Sunday nights at Grey Hills took on extreme importance.
What he called: 'my well-known downfall' began semi-privately. Mercy, on her way home from drinks with Diane Fox at Gino's Hearthside one fine evening in the spring abruptly decided that she'd had enough and determined to kick him out of their lovely new home in Bell Woods. By noon on Tuesday word of what she'd done had reached Beacon Hill. "Dja hear what happened Friday night, Danny Hilliard? His wife got home this class she's takin' up at UMass.? Threw him out. He wasn't even doin' nothing. Didn't have a fight with her or anna thing like that.
Just sittin' there, havin' a beer, watchin' the TV or something'. Had no idea anna thing goin' on; just waitin' her to come home. Make him some dinner, you know? How'd he know what she's got on her mind? But she comes inna door, says: "Okay, I've had it. Get your ass out. I'm sick of lookin' at you. We're finished." Hear he begged and pleaded her, too; prackly got down on his knees, she'd give him just one more chance. Didn't do him no good. "Nothin' doin'," she says, "I said out, I mean out. Now leave or I calla cops." He couldn't budge her.
She was stickin' to her guns, an' that was it. His ass went out on the street."
The public humiliation immediately crippled him politically. Mercy's assertion of control and his submission to it emboldened people who until then had concealed their envy of the power that made them afraid to show him any disrespect. He initially resisted acknowledging the change.
"Not that it ever really meant anything, as you know. The adjective, I mean. The job hasn't changed any since I got it. It's still either the second or third in line: Speaker; Majority Leader; and then Ways and Means. Or Ways and Means before the floor leader. I never had any more actual power'n anyone else ever did in the job. It just became part of the title: "Powerful." Like when we were growin' up, the baseball team that always stunk, where the Red Sox always went to buy the player that they needed, Vern Stephens, Ellis Kinder? No one never called them the plain old "Saint Louis Browns." Always "the hapless Saint Louis Browns." So I was always "the powerful chairman." "A sobriquet"; it didn't mean shit, but I gotta admit I did love it."
"It did mean something, though," Merrion said to him later, after he had begun to recover. "It meant a lot. It's okay to claim now that it never meant anything when they said you hadda lotta power, just's long's we don't forget it's not true. It meant a lot. It was what my father used to call "a very handy gadget." When the papers kept reminding people how much power you had, lots of people believed it.
They didn't think about how or why this should be, you seemed to have so much power. They just thought it was true. They saw it right there inna paper.
"They thought it meant that you could do something to them, something nobody else would've even known how to do. They didn't know what it was, and they didn't know anybody else who did, either, but they also knew they sure didn't want to be the ones who pissed you off so they found out. So therefore when I call, once they hear who's onna line they know you want something done; they pay close attention. They may think I'm a dummy but they're scared of the ventriloquist. They know he can cut their balls off. So they want to please me, you know? Want me to be happy. Piss me off; they got you pissed off. That they do not want to happen.
"I don't know what it was that they thought you could do to them then that you couldn't've done to them before. Maybe they just never thought about it. All I know's that when they did, I could make good use of it. All I hadda do was ask politely; right off they would do what we wanted. I liked that. It made my life easy. It was a good way to do business.
"Now I can't do that anymore. You got people laughing at you, result of you bein' such an asshole Mercy finely kicked you out. People don't jump to please guys they're laughing at. I hafta frighten them now, apply actual muscle; tell them if they don't do what we want them to do, they may be out of a job. It seems wasteful, you know?
Undignified, too, using your power every time, making people do what they should want to do, just to get little stuff done."
Other things changed in subtle ways too. Over the years Hilliard had spent a sizeable number of quietly congenial Sunday evenings at Grey Hills, maybe ten or a dozen a year, having what he called a little dinner with the lads," turning one corner of the sparsely populated dining room into a men's club for the night, washing down steaks, chops and roast beef with whatever the indifferent house-red wine was that year. Merrion could usually be counted on; a phone call to his home would fetch him if he hadn't spent the day at the club, playing golf in good weather or if rain was pouring down, unassumingly catching a few hands of modestly profitable quarter-half poker in the lounge with a ballgame in progress on the TV across the room. Usually when he stood up from his chair he was thirty or thirty-five bucks ahead. He seldom lost, and never more than ten dollars; he quit early when he encountered a run of second-best hands. He refused side-bets on the ballgames, saying: "No, I play cards because I know what cards will do.
I don't know what people will do."
Rob Lewis's wife belonged to The Opera, Theater and Museum Society in Springfield; each year between Labor and Memorial Days it offered members eight completely-packaged long-weekend travel-tickets-meals-hotel excursions to New York. Indulging her passion for the visual and performing arts, all of which Rob detested, Lena took all of the trips "Four thousand bucks a year and worth every damned penny; I'd sooner rub shit in my hair'n sit through another damned opera." He was around at least seven or eight Sundays a year.
Heck Sanderson and six or seven other male members, widowed or divorced themselves both, in Heck's case long before Hilliard's travails began had for years on and off been at loose ends around the club at dinnertime, much gladder of Hilliard's company than he'd ever dreamed until he learned the hard way how much he'd come to value theirs.
"Get a good close look at this guy, fellas," Heck said one evening late in June of that year to Merrion, Ralph Flood and Bobby Clark who was as usual quietly and purposefully drinking exactly as much Haig amp; Haig Pinch as he would need to stay moderately, comfortably drunk until it was time for the twenty-minute, three-mile drive home to bed when Hilliard had become particularly lugubrious, 'this's a very rare bird we've got with us here tonight. This here's the first man in North America who's ever gone through a divorce. He was married for years and then all of a sudden, one sunny morning, he woke all by himself first one in the entire history, this republic. We got us a real curiosity here: when he dies we're gonna get him stuffed and put him in a glass case in the lobby on display. Members'll be able to look at him free, charge the public a quarter to see him."
Then he had clapped Hilliard on the shoulder, hard, and guffawed. "Aww, maybe I'm being too hard on him here. Being as how he's a Catholic and all, he most likely wasn't prepared for it. Catholics're much better'n the rest of us. Catholics don't get divorced, see, so he thought he had a guaranty. Never could happen to him."
Merrion made a mental note to lose any and all future requests Heck made to Hilliard through him, and to make sure that if Heck's kid ever did get in trouble in the Canterbury jurisdiction, the case would go to Lennie Cavanaugh. Cavanaugh would do whatever Merrion suggested; Heck would not get many laughs out of what he had in mind to do if the day ever came when he could do it. Once when asked what he did for Hilliard after he'd left the Holyoke office to become a court clerk, Merrion said: "Well, Danny's sort of kind-hearted. It's a weakness of his; he suffers from compassion. He also tends to forget things. So if somebody does something to him that they shouldn't do, sticks a shiv in his back, say, he's likely, you know, to forgive the treacherous bastard. Say "Oh, he didn't mean it. I'll give him another chance." Or else forget he even stuck him inna first place.
"Danny knows he's this way, and he knows he shouldn't be. But he also knows that I am not I am not like that at all. I am different. I don't forgive and I never forget. So what I do for him, I'm in charge of grudges. I collect all his grudges for him, make sure they're put away in a safe place, water 'em and keep 'em fresh and moist. And then when payback day comes 'round, as we know it always does, I have the right grudge to settle, and whammo, we pop the guy. I'm the guy who makes sure that the guys who hurt Danny get nailed, big-time, paid back at least double for whatever they did to us."
Hilliard had been too humbled to get mad at Sanderson. He conceded the point. "You begin to see things a different way, once something like this happens to you, I guess, huh?" he said. Heck, perhaps finding something disturbing him in Merrion's expression, cleared his throat and said placatingly, somewhat nervously, that he knew he certainly had. Merrion, mindful he had trouble maneuvering Heck into bad bets for much money at cards, noted the hasty contrition but deferred judgment as to whether it was merely tactical or sufficiently sincere to save Julian from what he had in mind some good wholesome time in jail.
For Hilliard until his own disaster those Sabbath dinners had been mere felicitous accidents, irregular pick-up things that just happened; low-key, casual occasions of camaraderie for him and therefore the other men who'd been around for dinner and sat down at tables with him, connoting no unhappiness, dislocation or decline. Without ever thinking about it, he'd assumed that the explanation for their presence was the same as his: they were temporarily on their own and did not choose to cook. Until the winter of 1980-81, he had been at the club on Sunday nights in the dead of winter because in '73 Mercy and the kids had started spending February school vacations with her folks at their new chalet at Bolton Valley, skiing every day. February was a busy month on Beacon Hill, and Hilliard, who'd never skied well and found time spent with Florence and Bud Hackett 'not a garden of earthly delights," had long since given up on both the sport and his in-laws.
Mondays through Fridays those weeks he'd stayed in Boston in the small one-bedroom apartment that he kept on Lindall Street on the back slope of Beacon Hill (paying the rent out of campaign contributions while continuing to collect tax-exempt reimbursements for daily mileage), usually screwing Stacy three or four times until early 75, when she caught her network break and moved to New York.
He always fucked Stacy at her place. Mercy regularly came to Boston to see her friends from Emmanuel for Symphony, or to shop at Filene's Basement, staying over once or twice a month to make Dan take her to a play, or dinner with friends from the House whose wives she deemed acceptably smart and polished -she was pleasant to their 'somewhat-loutish' husbands.
Mercy'd never hidden her suspicion of his vulnerability to sexual temptation, or her apprehension that by leasing the apartment he was revealing his intention to surrender to it. Nights when he was staying in Boston he usually called her at home around ten, while she watched TV in bed; she often kept herself awake an extra hour in order to call him back after midnight, half an hour after Stacy would have finished her shift at the station, saying: "Just checking up on you, sweetie.
Making sure you're still there. Didn't suddenly decide to pop out for bread and milk right after we hung up. Also that I don't hear someone walking around barefoot on her tippy-tippy-toes, being very, very quiet, while we're talking now." She called in the morning, too, inserting long pauses in their conversations to see whether she could hear his shower running. She had sharp eyes that she used boldly, forthrightly inspecting his pad for traces of trespassing female occupancy every time she visited. "Ooh, and how is the FBI these days?" Stacy would coo sweetly, with wide eyes, when Mercy's name came up.
Saturdays and Sundays book-ending the family ski-vacations Hilliard had spent working Saturday forenoons at his Holyoke office, after 1978 luxuriating by himself in the ten-room home in Bell Woods, proprietorially watching basketball games on his forty-inch TV and snow accumulating on the field and in the pine woods behind the house where Emily rode her Morgan horse. Sunday evenings he pulled on a white wool turtleneck and a blazer before driving languidly over to Grey Hills to see who might be around for dinner.
That lazy and expansive attitude he'd had and imputed to his friends of purely optional self-indulgence had been dispelled in the days of depositions and preliminary hearings in Hilliard vs. Hilliard, Hampshire County Probate Court #82-268-D, the D denoting divorce proceedings. Living by himself in a condominium he'd sublet furnished at the splendidly refurbished Old Wisdom House overlooking Hampton Pond, he found the change of residence 'discombobulating," his mind thrown off-balance by the unfamiliarity of living in someone else's luxury. He told Merrion it was like waking up in a rented room on the road morning after morning; "It's a very nice hotel, but now I want to go home," he said. "I lie there as I'm waking up and I think: "This is really a beautiful place, but when do I get to go home?"
He had chosen to live there as abruptly as Mercy had decided she'd had enough of him. Merrion lived there, having purchased a two-bedroom unit during the rehabilitation and conversion phase of the old inn into condominiums six years before. Because he knew and liked the woman who managed the place, Glenda Rice, he could get the rental set up for Hilliard fast.
The hurry had been Mercy's creation; having taken eight years to make up her mind what she wanted done, she wanted it done at once. The day after Tax Day, Friday the 16th, she had come home from her afternoon seminar in statistics at UMass. later than usual, delayed by the unusual length of the conversation she'd had with Diane.
She'd been troubled for a week by something she had overheard in the Grey Hills pro shop the previous Saturday. She had been sitting behind the sweaters racked on the chrome trolley in the women's clothing section, trying on new Foot-Joy spikes. She was trying to decide well before the golf season started whether to order a new pair, which would be a fresh nuisance to break in, or continue to put up with the existing nuisance: her shoes occasionally gave her blisters. A man whose face she could not see and whose voice she didn't recognize came up to the counter where Bolo Cormier sat on his stool at the register, moving his lips as he read his paper and drinking coffee as he did most days between golf seasons. They had some brief conversation to which she paid no attention, but then as she hunched over to lace up the brown-and-white saddle-shoe on her right foot, dropping her head below the sweaters, she heard the man say: "Dan Hilliard been around today or's he with his new girlfriend down in Boston? I called his house and office didn't get an answer."
She had turned her head quickly to peer under the sweaters as Bolo said "Dunno, haven't seen him," but had not had the presence of mind to part them before the grey flannel slacks and the dark-brown tasseled loafers turned away from the register and left the store.
"Well, but did you really need to?" Diane said over the salt-rimmed conical glasses of margueritas in the Flower Room at Gino's, water splashing from the fountain into the low-sided kidney-shaped fire-brick pool with the Trader Vic's-type tropical-rain machine showering softly down over it. The sound system played an instrumental version of "Jamaica Farewell." "What difference would it've made if you had found out who it was? Or'd recognized the voice? The point is that it's common knowledge, out there at oh-aren't-we-elegant Grey Hills, that your husband's got a popsy on the side. It's not some chick who picked him up in a bar and he'd had a few too many drinks and he was lonely, so they had a one-night stand. This is an ongoing thing. He's having an affair, creating a new secret history with someone who lives in Boston. I mean, my God, Marcia, pardon me, but that's what I think should concern you. If you have any question here, it isn't who said he's got a girlfriend; it's: "Who is the little slut?" That's what you need to know, so you can find out where she lives, hunt her down and scratch her eyes out.
"Assuming of course, that's what you have in mind; otherwise you don't need to know anything more. Do you have any idea at all as to who it might be?"
Mercy shook her head and chewed her lip. "No," she said, 'not now, I don't. A few years ago I would've said Yes. I was sure he was having an affair with this TV reporter Stacy Hawkes. You may've seen her; I know I used to, a lot, by accident. It's very hard when your husband's honey's on network TV. You can't help it; every time you see her, even after it's over, you think: "There's the little tramp who stole my husband." I think she's still on NBC; I know I wont watch NBC news.
She got married a year or two ago; a former congressman, I think, retired to become head of some foundation. She must go for older political types. I don't know how she looks now, but back then she was very attractive. Looked a lot like me, as a matter of fact, which didn't surprise me -they say men often pick girlfriends who look like their wives. Does the fondness for lookalikes mean they have no imagination? Or because that way it doesn't seem so much like cheating?"
Diane laughed. "This's okay because it's the same, even though it's really different; and it's better because it's so different, but okay because it's the same." Maybe that is how it works."
"Assuming, of course," Mercy said, 'that didn't sound like boasting. I probably should've said she looked the way I like to think I used to look, when I was about twenty; before three pregnancies and about fifteen years. The only stretch marks this kid would've known about would've been the ones she left on the truth.
"We met her I met her at an inauguration party. I didn't think they had it planned. Dan's not the type to do that, although I suppose she might've been: "Ought to meet the incumbent wife here, see what I'm up against." It seemed as though wed just happened to bump into her, turned around and poof, there she was like a genie; someone'd conjured her up. And the instant that I looked at her, before Dan'd even had a chance to introduce us or wed even shaken hands or said Hello or anything, I had the strongest feeling wed been sharing him. I just knew it. Her expression, you know? She looked like she was smiling very well, of course, as you'd expect, all that training they get before they go on-air, so they smile perfectly. But there was something else in it. Smugness, you know? Something almost gleeful.
"You may not know who I am, dear I'm the competition."
"I looked at him, right off, but there was no sign of it on his face.
Completely pure-innocent look. Of course he's a politician; no matter what mischief he's really been up to, he always looks like he's serving Mass. And at the same time I was watching her, to see if she was glancing at him for the same reason I'd been doing. If she was, I didn't catch her."
Mercy frowned. "Not too long after that I read in the papers she'd gone to New York. So I haven't a clue as to who the current girlfriend is. The recumbent mistress."
"Even so," Diane said, 'is that really so important anyway? That you don't know who the bimbo is her name or where she comes from? You don't really care what her pedigree is; how big her boobs are; how she met him; or whether she's the same one he was fooling around with last year. Or even if she's the only one or just the main one he's screwing now. Why does that interest you? The important thing isn't who he does it with when he's not doing it with you; it's that he's doing it with someone else. And from what you've been telling me over the years, he's been doing it for a long time. You've told me several times that when you've confronted him, his stories didn't match up but you knew he had someone. You could tell he was lying."
"I know," Mercy said, "I have told you that. I've told myself, too, many times. But I've never been able to prove it, actually prove he was lying. I've never been really sure."
"Yes, you have," Diane said calmly. "Back when McGovern was running and they had that big fundraiser for him in Boston? Dan was supposed to introduce him and either he was about two hours late or else he never showed up at all? You told me then, what you heard people saying. Even your mother told you she'd heard rumors, where he'd been instead of where he should've been."
"It was that he'd been with Stacy Hawkes," Mercy said. "I got very upset. I asked him about it and he assured me, he wasn't seeing her.
He was very contrite. He said he knew it looked bad, but it really wasn't what happened. He said he got tied up in a very hush-hush leadership meeting in the Speaker's office after five, something about the strategy they were going to use to grease a tax bill through or something, and he got so involved he lost all track of time. Not only that but he also thought he probably might've let it happen, in a way; allowed it to happen, some kind of a Freudian slip, accidentally-on-purpose. Because he'd let himself get roped into making the introduction at the McGovern dinner by someone he couldn't say No to be owed the guy a favor and might need him in the future.
When he wasn't really for McGovern, anyway; he'd wanted Kennedy. He hadn't wanted to make the speech in the first place.
"I don't think I really believed him. But he said it'd also hurt him with the party bigwigs, his not showing up like that, and he knew it'd also hurt me, and he gave me his solemn promise he'd never let it happen again. He promised me he was going to shape up, stop getting himself into situations like that where that's what people thought he was doing. And I didn't say any more."
"In other words, he admitted it," Diane said. "And he promised you he wouldn't do it again. Those weren't the words he spoke to you, but that was what he was saying, and it was what you heard. You let him get away with it because you didn't want to hear him say the words he actually meant. And then you quickly made a very clear but unconscious decision: you decided you'd be better off staying with him even though you knew he'd been out fucking around on you than you would be without him, as long as he didn't do it again. That was what you said to him; he'd hurt you but you forgave him and were going to believe he wouldn't do it again. And on the strength of that you were giving him another chance.
"Those weren't the words you used, because you didn't want to hear yourself saying them. But that was what the words you did say meant, and so that was what he heard. And that was how the two of you, by working very well and carefully together, got through a major crisis.
Teamwork. If it'd been handled any differently with any less delicacy; with brutal honesty, say it would probably have meant the end of your marriage. The perfect, picture-book couple, working together to resolve the crisis but at the same time making absolutely sure neither one of you had to come to grips with what'd caused it; take a good hard look at how damage'd been done. That way you could pretend there hadn't been a crisis, or any damage. You could tell yourself your marriage was rock-solid; everything still A-okay. And he could tell himself you'd given him permission to fool around, if he'd only be discreet.
"So," Diane said, "McGovern, you said? That would've been ten years ago. Stacy's long gone, but things haven't changed. Since then there've been other times when you've told me other, but similar, stories. Not really that many, but I've never thought that was because there weren't many to tell you just preferred to keep them to yourself; that way they wouldn't seem so real."
"Oh, gee, yeah, I guess," Mercy said, shaking her head. "Sometimes it's been pretty hard."
"Hey," Diane said, 'you two did a very impressive job that night, shadow-boxing with each other. Textbook example of how two people whose marriage is in deep trouble can keep it together if they both really want to, provided they're willing to compromise and then both work really hard. You both wanted to, had a lot to lose. You, the marriage, and Dan his political career. So you reached a modus vi vendi a way to live with each other."
Mercy held the stem of her marguerita glass between the tips of the fingers of both hands and impassively met Diane's gaze with dry eyes.
"Happy?" Diane said.
Mercy snickered. "No," she said, drawing it out. Then she said: "That surprise you?"
"Yeah, sort of," Diane said, 'if you were happy living this way, I'd say the accommodation you and Dan arranged was a very good one.
Excellent, in fact. After all, the truce's held. It's worked for eight fairly peaceful years. You could even call them "contented."
You've gotten along without any major blow-outs, far as I know. Your kids've turned out well; they seem to be in good shape. Peaceful two-parent families're good for small persons; the two of you're good parents.
"Dan's been successful. He doesn't drink any more than most of the men his age that I know, including my own dear husband. That's far too much, of course, but this isn't a perfect world. He doesn't gamble and he doesn't hit you. You may not think you still look as good as you did in your twenties, and you're probably right about that so, say you now only look like about nine-hundred-thousand bucks. That still ain't chopped liver, dearie. You've got a lovely new home. You're making good progress toward an interesting career of your own.
"This's not a bad life that you two've made, not a bad little life at all. You're what, forty-two? And he's forty-six? You've been married about twenty years? Somebody did something right. Many people would look at what you and Dan have and say it looks pretty damned good.
Dan's habitual and persistent infidelity's just about the only flaw in it, at least that I can see. If he did decide now that he wanted to change, for whatever reason some philandering close friend of his were to die of AIDS and throw a big scare into him he probably couldn't do it. He's priapic. By now he most likely can't help it."
Mercy sighed.
"It isn't an uncommon problem, Marcy," Diane said. "Several of the Kennedy men seem to've suffered from it. Lots of marriages that have it survive forever, and I don't mean just royalty, either. Far more couples than most people think stay together despite incorrigible infidelity or at least until one of the spouses dies, as close to forever as we get. If you're able to be happy even though it means you'll always have to overlook his one shortcoming -maybe that isn't the right word my advice would be: Leave it alone.
"But if you were happy, or could convince yourself you were, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation. Or any of the others we've had about essentially the same subject through the years. So then, if all of that means that you haven't been happy, just unhappily sort of inert; that you're not happy now and don't really see much chance you ever will be, as long as you stay with him, for the rest of this one life you have left, then I would say: "It's over; it's dead and ain't gonna get better pronounce it. Call it quits. Kick him out."
Then the Sunday night dinners suddenly became very important to Hilliard, taking on an aspect of poignant urgency.
Merrion was compassionate. He had watched a number of people whom he knew reasonably well as they stumbled and staggered emotionally and mentally through divorces, and he was satisfied that the days and nights that they exhausted invariably brought demoralizing anguish under the best of circumstances. "But yours is going to be worsen the usual mean pissing contest, and God knows those're bad enough. This one I'm braced for."
"Oh, she's going to crucify me," Hilliard said, sharing a six-pack of Heinekens one night in the office on High Street.
"I reckon she'll try to," Merrion said.
"And you don't blame her," Hilliard said.
Merrion had prepared for that question. "Danny," he said, "I didn't say anything, you start having the one-night stands while you're staying in Boston. I think it was prolly quite a while before I begin to know about them. Mercy knew as much as I did, I think, and what I knew was nothin'. You were bein' very careful then.
"But then around me this's just around me; I don't think you've gone completely out of your mind so that you've started tippin' off Mercy it seems like you maybe start getting' a little careless. Droppin' a few hints here and there; sort of letting things slip out. I was stunned.
It was so outta character for you. Adultery wasn't like you, Dan.
"Cheating? On his wife? Danny Hilliard doesn't cheat, not on anybody.
He doesn't break his word. Dan Hilliard told you something? It's gold; you can take it to the bank." I think that's how you got away with it so long. People who'd known you a long time, including me and Mercy, we never dreamed you'd ever do a thing like that to her. We weren't looking for the signs and so we didn't see them.
"So you start givin' clues. I do my best to ignore them. If you're getting laid in Boston, well, I didn't think it was the best idea you ever had maybe get yourself a little herpes you then bring home to the bride; might be tough, explain that but then I'm not your chaperone, tell you to keep your pants zipped. You didn't hire me for that. I'm your, what, "close advisor"?" '"Confidante," Hilliard said. "That's what they call you. They think I confide in you. We've heard the chimes at midnight. Tell you what it is I've got on my mind; ask you what you think I should do."
"Okay," Merrion said, 'so I'm your "confidante" then. "Friend" would've been what I would've said, somebody asked me what I was, I was trynah be anyway, but "confidante" 's okay. Lemme see if I got this straight now: this would then mean that when you started dropping the hints you'd been fucking your brains out and I mean that here, literally you were meaning to do it. You weren't being careless at all: You were confiding in me that you were getting a lot of out-of-town pussy while you're far from your happy home, and asking me for my advice.
"Geez, I'm really sorry, Dan; I blew it. Really let you down; didn't realize that's what you wanted. If I had've, my advice would've been I didn't think it was very damned smart, fucking around on the side. In fact I thought it was fucking stupid, that is what I thought it was.
"Then I would've told you what you should've already known: "Seeing how I'm getting laid now and then, not as often's I'd like, but not bad, I know I'm not being a good example for you; but I'm not trying to be one. Being a good example's never been part of my job. If it had been, I wouldn't've taken it.
'"And furthermore," I now see I should've said when what you were after was advice about extra-curricular fucking, but I was too stupid to see it I should've reminded you of something that I would've thought you already knew, without me reminding you; I should've said: "I am not married. This is a very important distinction when what we're talking about's getting laid. I know there're people, still lots of people, who don't approve of getting laid unless the person who's in bed with you's your wife. Or if you're a woman, your husband. But nobody seems to think you should be punished for it if she isn't unless she's someone else's wife, or you've also got a wife. Then they think you should be at very least admonished heavily, like we sometimes say in the court. Some would even go so far as to say you should be booted out on your lying ass and see how you like that." And as of course we -and the rest of the population of the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts now know, Mercy belongs to that group.
"But that stands to reason. She's a wife. Wives're especially prone to this kind of thinking, or so I've been told. I do not have a wife.
Once I thought I probably would, some day, if Sunny ever decided she oughta maybe come home and slow down a little, but as you know she died first still goin' strong. Too bad. But the result is I not only don't have a wife; I never did have a wife and I never ran for office, so what I do is nobody's business. It's always been okay for me to get laid. Not always easy, but if I got lucky, okay.
"Since you do have a wife," as you did, back then, when I wasn't giving you the advice you wanted; pretty soon I now think you're not gonna, "getting laid isn't okay, no matter how big the young lady's tits are, or how hot she is for your rod. So my advice to you is "Cut it out."
"But you wouldn't've," Merrion said. "If I'd advised you to stop fucking around, you wouldn't've done it you would not've stopped fucking around."
"Probably not," Hilliard said, looking gloomy.
Merrion laughed. "Absolutely not," you mean," he said. "Never in one million years. Because when you started letting me know you had all these gorgeous women coming onto you down there, you weren't being careless you were doing it on purpose. And you weren't doing it so I would then clear my throat and give you lots of good advice you wouldn't take. You were doing it to let me know I wasn't the only guy who could get a piece of ass; even you, a married guy, were getting more, and better. What you were doing was bragging, old chum, just plain old locker-room bragging."
Hilliard looked miserable. He rubbed the knuckles of the ringers on his left hand with his right thumb, and pursed his lips. He mumbled something to himself.
"I know, Danny, and I'm really sorry," Merrion said, 'but I think you oughta hear this. You fuckin' earned it. When you were hurting Mercy, you were also putting me in a box, you started letting me know what you'd been doing. You hadda know it, too; that you were putting me in an awful position with Mercy.
"You and I both know she's never been that keen on me," Merrion said, 'not from the very beginning, I first started working for you. What I was then, and what I'll always be, at least to a certain degree, is someone who Mercy put up with. But since then as the years'd gone by, when you first started letting me know you'd been out getting strange, things'd gotten so they'd started improve a little. She still wouldn't've picked me as her sponsor for Confirmation, but now and then, I said something, she laughed. It wasn't much, but it was progress. In this world you take what you can get.
"So this is where we are, Mercy and me, you decide things're too quiet.
It's starting to get a little better with us, between me and her. I no longer have to wear a coat indoors if she's around, so I don't get a stiff neck from the chill. She still didn't like me; I'm not saying that. But I think she got to the point where she decided that you hadda have someone who can do my kind of work, cutting the balls off a guys; and who also knows what certain kinds of people aren't refined like you two are, think about what's going on. As I do, being one. And she sees that the reason that you have to have someone like me's because there's more people like men there are of you two, you want me to put it bluntly. So if you wanna run for something, what we roughnecks think is important, and you'd better have someone who can tell you. And once Mercy'd realized that, that was when things between us got better. She still thinks I'm a bad influence on you; and I know she'll never change that; but I think she's decided there has to be one, and I'm about the best one you could find.
"So at that point what we were, Mercy and me, we're partners in a small business. The plant and the product is you. Dan Hilliard Political Futures. Way she sees it or used to at least, 'fore you got your thing caught inna zipper her job is to keep you in good shape: physically, mentally, husbandly, fatherly throw in morally, too. My job's to look after the other stuff you do; make sure you're in good shape politically and publicly. We don't have regular meetings, her and I, every month or two, but both of us know what we're supposed to do. What areas we're supposed to take care of. We've both got an interest in you.
"Then, thanks to you, several years ago I begin to realize we have got a malfunction-red light flashing in the morality area. Alarms going off in the husband and father sections too. The product looks like it may be onna way to destroying itself. Something needs to be done. I know this. But I'm not in charge of those sections. I have got no jurisdiction. I'm not even supposed to go into those areas; they're off-limits to me. And I can't report the malfunction to the person in charge of those sections because while I'm very sure she'll want to make the necessary repairs, immediately, I'm afraid she'll react in a way that'll damage the product's condition politically and publicly, by taking a hammer to it making a big fuckin' stink. And when she does that, the product'll get mad at me, because the way he's gonna look at it, I damaged him confidentially and I abused his trust.
"So there I am now, right where you put me, spang in the middle: I'm fuckin' stuck; I'm helpless. All I can do is keep my mouth shut, and just hope an' pray you get over this hot spell of yours before Mercy finds out what's now become two things: one being that you've been runnin' around, which I know'll destroy you with her; and two that I knew and I didn't tell her, which'll finish me off with her, too."
Hilliard shook his head and cleared his throat, but he kept his eyes downcast and did not say anything.
"Those hopes and prayers did not quite work out as I wanted. I could see this. So when you stopped bein' coy, droppin' hints, come right out and told me you were fucking Stacy you're like a little kid with a new electric train; you're fucking Stacy Hawkes, and you two just invented sex I figured that was it; the shit was in the fan. You weren't coming to your senses; there was nothing I could do. Well, that was when I finally said I certainly hoped that you knew what an awful chance you were taking. And furthermore, I also said I'd seen some self-destructive assholes in my time but you took the cake. And you know what you said to me? Do you remember, Dan?"
Hilliard remained downcast and shook his head. He mumbled something.
Then he gulped. Merrion said: "What?"
Hilliard did not look up, but did manage to nod. "Yeah," he said, 'yeah I remember. I know what I said."
"You laughed at me," Merrion said. "Then you told me to go fuck myself. And then a week or two after that chat, you missed the McGovern dinner." He paused. "I figured that was the end of you. I had you down as totaled. History. I thought you'd never survive it.
So there I am, I'm all prepared for the bomb to go off- thanking God that at least I'd been smart enough to get my court job before you decide to commit suicide. And then weeks went by and no bomb went off.
Nothing happened, so I never asked you. What the hell did you do? How the hell did you pull that one off?"
Hilliard shrugged. "It took a while before it got back to her," he said. "The kids were still at home and in school, keeping her busy.
She wasn't out that much with other people, especially people who knew what was going on. And when she was out with those kind of people, she was out with them with me. We tend to forget this, guys like you and me, but you have to be pretty deep on the inside to know most of the stuff that goes on. Not too many people are. Those who do know don't tend to tell their wives too much of it; they got secrets of their own they don't want me telling my wife, 'cause the next time she sees their wife she might tell her a thing or two. So they don't tell their wives I've got something on the side, and I don't tell my wife what they're up to. No one ever tells you this; you figure it out on your own. It's something we all understand.
"So even though everybody on the Hill's giving me the business, the story didn't make it out this way until Mercy's fuckin' mother picked up something in the wind, she's out flyin' around Weston on her broom, and then I had myself a problem."
"I'm curious," Merrion said. "What'd you do?"
Hilliard shrugged. "I saw it as a political challenge. If I'd never gone into politics, I never would've fucked Stacy. I never would've seen her, not in person anyway, and if I ever had've somehow, well, she wouldn't've looked twice at me. So I treated it as a political problem. I resorted to time-honored tactics: I stood up like a man and I lied."
"And Mercy believed you?" Merrion said. "Amazing. I never would've."
Hilliard bloused his cheeks out. "Of course you wouldn't've," he said.
"The Charlie Doyles of this world wouldn't've. None of you would've had to. So therefore I wouldn't've told you that story; you would've laughed in my face. But she had a weakness, so she couldn't laugh; she had to believe me. And so she made herself do it." He shook his head.
"If your next question's whether I'm disgusted with myself, the answer is: I am now, but I wasn't then. Then I was proud of myself, and that makes me feel even more disgusted."
"And maybe even more ashamed?" Merrion said.
Hilliard looked at him. He pursed his lips and swallowed. "Goin' for the full skin, huh, Amby? Not just for the scalp?" Merrion nodded.
Hilliard said: "Well yeah, that too then, pal of mine: even more ashamed."