A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  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."

  SIX

  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."