A change of gravity

TEN

Julian's second student shanked his drive badly, high-hopping it off the turf into the grove of young maples down near the bend in the Wolf River to the right. Hilliard said he hit them intentionally because he enjoyed 'nature walks' along the riverbanks. Further down the river flowed placidly under a stone bridge set in the middle of the third fairway, just about a slightly duffed one-hundred-sixty-yard splasher from the tee. From there it proceeded through the maple groves left standing to separate the front nine from the back and out the other side, running along the fourteenth and fifteenth fairways and making a deep hazard behind the twelfth green. South Brook also meandered through the course, penalizing inaccurate irons on the eighteenth and sixteenth holes. Under Grey Hills proprietorship the streams that Jesse Grey and his friends had fished so avidly principally functioned as cold wet storage for slightly used two-dollar golf balls hit by players well-enough-off to call them lost and hit new ones for their mulligans rather than get their feet wet.

In the summer every two or three weeks, shortly after sunrise, teenagers from Hampton Pond and Cumberland sneaked onto the course and snorkeled the deeper pools where the currents deposited the lost balls, surfacing with thick-gauge wire baskets streaming water and brimming with a couple dozen Titlists, Pinnacles, Max-His, Staffs and Spalding Dots; those uncut were unharmed by immersion. Then the kids pulled on their jeans and sneakers and disappeared into the woods.

The near-pristine balls they sold in furtive haste for six bucks a dozen, cash, to frugal and unprincipled golfers emerging from their cars in the parking lots or cursing hooks and slices while thrashing five and seven irons through the bushes along the fairways of public courses in Chicopee, Springfield and Holyoke. That phase of the trade was also clandestine; municipal course rules gave their pro-shop managers the same full-retail-price monopolies on sales of golf merchandise that Bolo Cormier enjoyed at Grey Hills. The public-course pros jealously guarded those rights, posting threatening signs condemning the ball-hawkers as trespassers and forbidding patronage of them the kids often had to run from the cops.

Somewhat-nicked or badly grass-stained but still-usable balls went five-for-a-buck to the manager of the Maple Knoll Driving Range on Route 47 in Hampton Falls. It was his idea to retrieve the balls, knowing the practice to be illegal but confident that he could get away with it. He had provided the buckets the kids used in the expectation he would get all the balls retrieved, paying a quarter each for the unblemished ones and reselling them to his customers for the same price the kids charged for them at the public links. He was aware of their direct service of that thriving market, angered by their treachery, and powerless to do anything about it.

Some Grey Hills members fished the river and the brook early in the cold of April each year. By the end of May weekday traffic on the course, still moderate enough to permit play by twosomes and threesomes who could walk the course if they wished, towing their clubs, became nearly constant, and, afraid they would be hit by stray balls, few came to fish. On holidays and weekends in high season when the sign-up sheet filled early, club rules specified all must play in foursomes.

Cormier claimed to take into account the ages, temperaments, mobility and skills of players when matching up single players or pairs of friends but admitted he was not always able to. Members who seldom purchased equipment in his shop or tipped him less than fifty dollars at Christmas often found their partners uncongenial, causing hard feelings. Cormier scheduled tee-times electric carts required; no strolling allowed every quarter-hour between 6:30 A.M. and 3:30 P.M. A sign in the office above the sign-up book stated that Grey Hills policy was to enable 288 players, about three-quarters of the membership, to play eighteen holes during prime time at least once each weekend if they wished, allowing 4.5 hours clasped time on the course for each full round.

Members of all ages denounced this practice as scandalously rushed.

"Might as well play public links and save the goddamn money; going to be this crowded here," Rob Lewis said more than once.

Toward the end of Gerald Ford's term as president, a number of quieter members, original founders and their close friends approaching their eightieth birthdays, mostly retired, became morose as they learned one by one that age inexorably imparts greater inaccuracy and inconsistency to all aspects of most players' games. They began to play undistinguished golf. This not only made them unhappy but also prompted gloating, needling remarks by insensitive younger, newer members who observed their elders' difficulties when Bolo teamed them in foursomes. The older members found this taunting petty, but tried to pretend to be amused. Off by themselves they sulked and brooded, seething that the club had ever found it financially necessary eight or ten years before to admit the upstarts into what they still thought of as their club, forgetting they had angrily rejected the only alternative: to assess each of them a heavy dues surcharge to pay for needed improvements and repairs. At meetings of the executive committee they retaliated with barbed remarks of their own, disparaging the club's increasing emphasis on golf and allocation of resources to it as unwise neglect of its other recreational resources, such as fishing, that members of all ages could enjoy.

To rebut the younger crowd's assertion that so few members fished, they declared that they fished nearly every day each spring, when the more recent members, still with jobs to tend, were unable to use the club, and therefore were not around to see them. They said resentfully that they quit fishing in May only because forced to by the golfing traffic.

All of this was true. The fishermen Rob Lewis and Heck Sanderson among them would show up in cold grey April when the course was in poor shape, their faces and conversations severe. At that time of year they scoffed openly at golf, as inferior to fishing as a test, exercise and demonstration of intelligence, dexterity and skill. They said they stooped to golf themselves only because the other golfers made the nobler sport imprudent, lamenting their enforced neglect of a fine natural resource.

The considerable number and reasonable size of the fish that Lewis and Sanderson and the others caught from the two watercourses annually caused a small stir among Grey Hills golfing purists who saw them on cold weekends when they used the club for lunch and drinks and wistful conversation about great golf days soon to come. Finding the fishing outfits and the behavior of the people in them laughable, they had assumed that people who looked funny could not possibly catch fish. But the anglers had a point when they lamented the summer inaccessibility of the streams. They had plenty of fish, and members caught a good many.

There were some mature brown trout in the river, the largest of them one or two three-pounders were caught each year and immediately declared lunkers fattened by ten-inch rainbows stocked by the State Department of Fisheries and Wildlife each spring. The department estimated the cost of each hatchery trout at $1.50. Many of them perished soon after arrival, before fishing season opened, those that eluded the big wild browns caught and eaten by hawks, fishers and otters that had learned to gather in the shadow of Mount Wolf upstream of the club as soon as the state truck went back out to the paved road.

The successful anglers were proud in the clubhouse when they returned with their creels and found someone who would incautiously ask to see their catches. They regularly had several good-sized trout to show.

After the kitchen staff had cleaned and grilled the fish, the fishing members would eat them in the dining room with much boastfulness about their flavor and many foamy dark-beer toasts to each other's prowess.

They owed their fish to Hilliard. In 1975 when he was still a power broker in the House, one quiet afternoon in March he had idly fallen into reflecting about the previous Sunday afternoon and evening he had spent at Grey Hills, first at a quarrelsome meeting of the membership committee and then over dinner with Merrion. The night before he and Mercy had gone to a dinner party at Walter and Diane Fox's home on Pynchon Hill in Canterbury. Even though Merrion was also almost always there, at Walter's invitation, it was one of Mercy's favorite ways to spend an evening out.

"I don't know whether you noticed it," Hilliard said to Merrion, cutting his cold roast beef, 'but when you suggested last night to Walter that he should join here, he just about laughed in your face. I don't think it was because he doesn't like you, or thought you were making fun of him. I think when you said you'd propose him and I'd second, he didn't believe you think anyone we sponsored would get in."

"I guess I didn't get it," Merrion said, eating lobster salad. "I thought he just wasn't interested. Too rich for his blood, I assumed.

Walter's fairly cheap, you know. "Throws nickels around like manhole covers," as Dad used to say."

"That wasn't what he said," Hilliard said. "What he did was laugh and shake his head and say: "I dunno, Amby. I don't think those folks're used to you yet, never mind bringing in your friends." He especially mentioned Warren Corey's name, and Rob Lewis's. I think what he meant is that someone's said something makes him think we may be members, but we don't belong yet, and maybe never will. We didn't get in on our charm. Everyone knows we bought our way in the club was desperate for money; we happened to have some, or you did; they held their noses and let us in. But they still resent the fact that they had to do it, and have to live with us now. That was what Walter was saying to you. In doesn't mean we've been accepted."

Merrion shrugged. "Fuck 'em," he said, spearing claw meat, "I like it here. I think it's a very nice place. Excellent golf course, very well run; I don't have to wait to tee off. Decent food and they serve a big drink. Expensive but I got the money; so, what? Me being here bothers someone else, that's their problem."

"Yeah," Hilliard said, 'but I was very conscious of it today at the meeting. What people said, how they acted, whenever a name would come up: I watched them to see how they'd react. I decided I think Walter's got something there. These bastards may like our money all right, but they're not very keen about us."

"Ummm," Merrion said, nodding and chewing. When he'd swallowed he said: "You prolly oughta stop goin' to dinner at the Foxes' house, is what I think. They're a bad influence on you. First you think Diane's trynah break up your marriage, giving Mercy dangerous notions, and now you're tellin' me what Walter said got you so edgy you're lookin' for insults today. You're becomin' a little hoopy, looking for conspiracies. You and fuckin' Jim Garrison. Next thing I know, I'll be in the audience, you're the speaker; I'm prolly dozin', waiting for the finish when I jump up from my chair, kick off the standing ovation and all of a sudden I'll be hearing you tell the people it was Nixon who killed Kennedy.

"And anyway, if they are bigoted, whaddaya gonna do about it call in the IRA to blow up the swimming pool?"

"Oh no, much worsen that," Hilliard said. "I'm going to do is think of something I can do that'll make these bastards beholden. Something for them that they either never thought of doing or if they had, they couldn't've made it happen. But I'm not gonna tell 'em, right off, who did this wonderful thing. I'm gonna sit back and watch 'til they've gotten attached to it. Then I tell 'em they owe it to me, and if they want to keep it, they'd better kiss my ass.

"And I never said I think Diane Fox's a bad influence on Mercy or that she's trying to break up my marriage where the hell did you get that idea?"

"It's obvious," Merrion said, finishing his lobster and dabbing his lips with the napkin. "You're paranoid about Diane. Many times I've heard you say you think Mercy's spending too much time with Diane; she gets all her ideas from Diane. One of them's that you're fucking around, which you are, and that's why Diane worries you. Meaning you think Diane's got it in for you."

"Well," Hilliard said, "I'll admit I'd like it better if Mercy had other friends, too."

Mercy had served on the Hampton Pond Community Service Center board of directors that had given Diane Crouse Whitney her first salaried job in counselling in 1970, when she got her master's in social work from UMass. They had taken to each other instantly. "Now I think I finally understand how you and Amby became friends so fast," Mercy said to Hilliard, the night she met Diane. She was standing by the front-hall closet of the house on Ridge Road in Holyoke, whipping off her tan trench-coat and paisley scarf, swirling them like a matador's cape to put them on a hanger.

"I feel like I've known this kid we had in tonight for years and years and years. She's only twenty-seven, which I know we thought was pretty old then, back when we were, but now it seems pretty young." She leaned against the frame of the hall doorway in her camel-colored short wool dress belted with red leather at the waist, her arms folded. He sat in his easy chair in the living room watching TV.

"Especially for family counselling. She's in the process of setting up a private practice, she told me afterwards. I held up a bit outside so I could talk to her a bit more; she told me Walter Fox's already showed her two offices in Hampton Pond. In that she'll be able pretty much to specialize in therapy for adolescents, young adults. She says she's just a grown-up kid herself, but one of the luckier ones. She made the dumb mistakes and did the stupid stunts that get kids in trouble, but came through them pretty much intact. Lots of kids don't, and those're the ones she can help.

"In the job we're offering, she wont be able to do that, concentrate on one age group. The referrals the center will get from the clinics and social agencies, the court will be people from every age group. She'd have to find a way to deal with all of them. A lot of the people needing help're going to be in their forties and fifties parents who're screwing up because they grew up in troubled families; husbands and wives who aren't getting along; substance abusers. And elderly people; there's a real need for bereavement counselling. Her age could be a handicap. People tend to resist telling their problems and taking advice from someone who's younger than they are.

"So if we give her the job, will she be able to cope? She's confident she can, of course, but how can we be sure? She's just gotten her degree; her judgments can't be all that empirically informed; how does she know what she can do? What basis does she have? How can we be sure?"

"That's easy," Hilliard said, nursing a Lowenbrau and watching Karl Maiden and Michael Douglas wrap up another case on The Streets of San Francisco, 'you can't."

"But then I ask," she said, 'does it matter how old someone happens to be? I'm really not sure. Anyone who wants this little part-time job, that doesn't pay much money, is either going to be young and inexperienced, like she is, or, if they're older, they're probably going to have something wrong with them. Either no experience, because they're career-changers, getting started late in counselling or else when we check their references we find out why they left or got fired from their previous place. I think we don't have much choice."

"So do I," he said, his eyes on the screen.

"Ohhh, you're not listening to me," she said, stamping down the hallway into the kitchen. "I don't know why I even bother, telling you anything. You never pay any attention."

"I was paying attention, for Christ sake," he said, his gaze still fixed on the screen. "What is it: if I agree with you or I don't interrupt you; or I don't answer a question because you haven't asked me one I must not be listening? I haven't been paying attention7. For Christ sake, gimme a fuckin' break here."

"Stop talking to me like you talk with Amby," she said loudly. This's Thursday night and you're at home here with me. It's not Friday night and you're not down on High Street, talking big with the boys. Try showing some class for a change."

"Jesus H. Christ," Hilliard said, taking his gaze off the screen as the volume went up in a Sears tire store commercial, speaking louder so that she could hear him in the kitchen, 'first I tell you for once I've got the night off. I don't have to go anywhere." He heard the cork come out of a wine bottle. "This is good because you've got a meeting.

This'll be one night when the kids wont have a sitter. So, I'm a good daddy. I help Emmy with her math and I flog Timmy into at least starting to read Ivanhoe. Then I even make them go to bed. Now you come home and you tell me, well, the substance of it anyway, that you're very impressed with this young woman who just got her master's, and even though she hasn't got any experience and you're afraid she might have trouble dealing with older patients, might not be her cup of tea, you're still very much leaning toward the idea that she's the one that you should hire, give her the job and get it over with. So you wont have to go out to meetings anymore on Thursday nights when you'd rather stay home after dinner with your family. And anyway: no matter who you end up hiring, anyone could present problems. That you'll always have that possibility.

"Not that you came right out and actually said all that stuff, but what you didn't say I could hear anyway. It was implied." The titles began to roll for Harry'O, starring David Janssen.

She came into the living room with a goblet of white wine and sat down.

"Okay wise guy," she said, 'so I guess you were listening. You're so smart, tell me what I do now."

"Is that my good Muscadet you're drinking?" he said.

"No it's not," she said. "It's the cheap Almaden Mountain white, from the jug. Now answer my question."

"Go through the rest of the interview process," he said. "Then when it's over, turn on the charm with the other committee members and hire her."

"I don't want to go through it," she said, pouting and sipping the wine. "She's the fourth person we've interviewed now. That's six hours we've put in, listening to people tell us how much they want the job."

"You sound like Emmy with her algebra," he said. "Don't see why they make us take this. I don't like it."

Mercy tossed her hair. "I do not," she said, 'and I don't care if I do so there." He laughed. "Six others we didn't even grant interviews to, they were so obviously unqualified. We've got four more scheduled to come in. One's a for tv-six-year-old psychology Ph.D. on the staff full-time at the Knox State Hospital. His letter says he wants to set up a private practice and he's decided Hampton Pond's where he wants to do it. He's making eighteen thousand dollars a year as a senior therapist and he's only got three more years to go at Knox which he can't do and come here at the same time before he qualifies for a pension. I'm not sure I believe him. It doesn't make sense to me.

Either he's fooling himself or he's playing with us. He's not going to dump that fairly good salary now and take our little job, paying six thousand dollars a year; if all he has to do is tough it out at Knox three more years and retire. There'll be another little job around some other pretty little town three years from now; he can start his practice then.

"The others that we've said we'll talk to: there's something slightly wrong with them too. You look at the resumes and think to yourself:

"Gee, I wish that wasn't there." "I'd feel better, she didn't have that."

"This other woman; she's forty-eight. That's a good age for our job; young enough to talk to the kids but still mature enough to be accepted by the older patients. She's had children, boy and a girl, both grown now, off on their own, apparently doing just fine. She's been divorced. Okay, nothing wrong with that anymore, having gone through a divorce; getting so more have 'n haven't."

She paused and chewed her lower lip. "Oh, must tell you this: this Diane also asked me, very casually, just by the way, out there in the parking lot, if Walter Fox might be getting a divorce. Well, I know from you that he is, but I'm not sure she should get it from me. So I said I didn't know. I think she might have her eye on him. Little old for her, you'd think, but still…"

"Oh, I'd think Walter can still probably get it up once a month or so, he gets proper rest and eats right," Hilliard said.

"Pig," she said. "Anyway, this woman's divorced: how that gives me a small problem? It's because she's been divorced three times. Once, even twice: sure, I could understand, but is it likely this woman's had three marriages fail and every time it was the other person's fault1.

That's hard to believe. And even if that's the case, she did have that much bad luck, it would still bother me. One way or the other that has to say something about what kind of judgment she's got, picking three husbands she couldn't live with. I'm certainly not going to want to hire her. I don't think anyone else will, either. So I don't think we need to see her. We should cancel that interview.

"Am I being fair?" she said. "Probably not. This younger woman's been through a divorce, and she isn't thirty yet. Plenty of time yet for her to rack up a couple more husbands, before she turns forty-eight. Would that make a difference to me? Could be. But she isn't forty-eight yet, she's twenty-seven, and her having the one marriage now behind her doesn't cause me the same concern.

"It's the same thing with the other two," Mercy said. "Something on their resumes that says regardless of how articulate, personable and compassionate they may turn out to be when they come in, we're not going to want to hire them. One's a man who admits that he's an alcoholic. He tries to make it into an advantage.

Says he's been sober eight years he's forty-two now and he's counselled many other alcoholics who've told him he's got a special empathy for drunks. Maybe he has, but so've bartenders, and drunks aren't the only kind of patients we get. A lot of them, sure, but that's not enough, knowing how to get the boozers into AA and get themselves straightened out. I don't want him.

"The other one's another man who's also got something in his background that disturbs me: he got all his training from his church. It's one of those evangelical Protestant churches, and for all I know he's a very fine man. But what we're looking for here's a counselor, not a lay preacher, and I think if we hire him every priest and minister and rabbi for miles around'd be up in arms."

"ACLU probably too," Hilliard said. "Public money funding private religion paying for missionary work. Nothing like a good old little church-and-state dust-up, get everyone's bowels in an uproar. No, I think you're right about all I doubt you'll hire any of them."

"So then," she said, "I should call up the others and see if they agree that we should cancel the rest we've got scheduled? Say: "Let's hire this one we saw last night. I think she's great. She's smart and she's eager and with the alimony I assume she gets she can live on our salary. And call up the others and tell them we're sorry but we've filled the job, and we wont be talking to them."

"Rotten idea," he said. "Please don't do that." "Why?" she said.

"I'm sure it's what we should do." lYou are," he said. "The other four people on the search committee may not be. One of them may be secretly backing one of those three or four candidates you now want to brush off — or one of the others you've already seen who didn't impress you as much. Don't forget that the committee called for these statements of interest, invited and solicited those applications.

People go to infinite pains when they compose those things. Their lives and egos go on those sheets of paper. They're not going to be pleased if you now just go and dump them.

"And the instant that you try to do what you said, any member of the committee who's got a candidate's going to be dead-set against anything and everything you propose after that. No matter how great the new friend you met tonight seems to you, they'll never vote for her; you will've made her into "Mercy's candidate." Never mind how pissed-off the candidates you didn't have come in'll be, with some justification; the other people on the committee'll start hollering bloody murder.

"You're as bad's your husband, going outside the process, ramming stuff down people's throats. You're trying to railroad us; who the hell do you think you are?"

"Even though they pestered you to get involved because they know with Donna in the Fernald we're interested in mental health, and you might even know something about what a counsellor needs to be. And because they figure maybe you can sweet-talk me into getting state money for their center. And maybe you might be able to do that, if everybody plays nice. But that little scheme'll go right by the boards if they decide now you're trying to run the show for them. You try to bull something through on this, they'll turn on you like dogs. People who don't like me will oppose your choice for that reason, and people who oppose you will try to get back at you through me. Don't do it.

Scuttle the statewide phase, sure, but honor the rest of the appointments."

"I really liked her, though," Mercy said.

"I understand that," Hilliard said. "You've made that very clear. Try not to do it again, with anybody else. Don't let on yet how impressed you were. Anyone asks, be open without telling them much. Be creative with the truth; if you have to, lie discreetly: misrepresent stuff they wont ever be able to prove. Say you're determined to keep an open mind. Give all the applicants fair, impartial hearings. You may've been more impressed with one or two than you were with a couple others, but that may be just the way you happened to feel the night they interviewed. May want to change your mind before you vote. You might let it slip out you think the best so far might be this what'd you say her name is?"

"Diane Whitney," Mercy said. "Her maiden name was Crouse. She's originally a midwesterner. Came here when she was still married her husband had a job at UMass." teaching economics. She's really quite pretty; sort of freckled, reddish hair, ties it back in a bun; might have a slight problem with her weight, I'd guess, but who hasn't. I can't imagine why any man who was married to her would ever want to divorce her."

"Maybe he didn't," Hilliard said. "Sometimes it's the lady's idea."

Walter Fox's divorce from Jackie had come through in the fall of 1970, a few months after Diane's appointment as the resident counselor at the Hampton Pond Community Service Center. Early in 1971 they married, Diane prevailing upon him to sell the massive white Victorian mansion in Hampton Falls left to him by his grandfather Phil and for their wedding present buy one of the properties his agency listed. It was a beautifully kept Federal Period two-story grey wooden house with white trim and a yellow door set among the oaks and maples on the rocky knob of Pynchon Hill. Her principal motive was the sunny new kitchen shrewdly installed at great but tax-deductible expense by the previous occupants, bent upon selling quickly at a good price. But they could afford it; Diane's practice had prospered nicely, and although Walter's extremely conservative management of the Fox Agency tended to keep profits small, they were steady.

Feeling herself unexpectedly settled and secure as she approached thirty, she began to develop an interest in what she called 'really serious cooking." Sabatier knives protruded from the birch block next to the stainless-steel six-burner gas range. The Zero King refrigerator dispensed cubed and cracked ice. Diane's was the first Cuisinart Mercy Hilliard saw in someone else's home.

"And the nicest thing about all of the equipment," Mercy said, 'is the absolute magic she does with it." Mercy admired her new friend boundlessly. The nine-year difference in their ages bothered neither of them at all. They talked on the phone four or five times a week and lunched every Friday in the glass-enclosed Flower Room at Gino's Hearthside, ordering salads nicoise and drinking iced tea so as to avoid gaining weight, and also so that neither Diane's patients nor Mercy's classmates in the UMass. graduate school of education would detect alcohol on their breath Friday afternoons.

To Hilhard it seemed clear from the beginning that Diane dominated the friendship. He was uneasy about it. It was Diane's example, if not something she'd said for all the difference that made that had prompted Mercy to think about what she would do if he should decide to divorce her. Mercy admitted it to him. "It happens," she said, 'it does happen to people. People you'd never expect it to. Diane said when she married Tommy and left Wisconsin-Madison to go to London with him, she never dreamed they'd ever break up. But by the time they got to UMass. she'd decided she'd better get her degree. She'd seen a couple of their friends get divorced, so she knew it did happen, and when it did the woman was a lot better off if she had something she could do.

She said that was what woke her up she didn't have any job skills. And even then it was almost too late he left for Chicago before she could finish up.

"If she hadn't been already enrolled in the program, so people knew her and got her financial help, she would've been sunk. She got enough alimony to live on, but not enough to pay tuition Without the help she would've had to drop out. Or else take a lot longer getting her degree. So it's a lot better, safer, to make sure that you're prepared. It may never happen; it'll probably never happen. But it's good to be prepared all the same. And anyway, what'm I supposed to do when Emmy and Timmy've grown up and have their own lives? I need to have a life too. A real job to go to, which I've never had. So even though I know of course I'd never divorce you I could never love anyone else I still want to have something to do.

"And I also know even though I'd never leave you, divorce isn't out of the question. A lot of your time's spent away from home, with interesting, exciting people. Doing interesting, exciting things. And more and more of them these days, are interesting and exciting young women, in the careers they're in because they're very goodlooking young women. And smart. I know you're always saying TV reporters are just pretty faces and hairdos, don't have a brain in their heads. Well excuse me, but I don't believe that. A lot of these women are smart.

That's how they got those jobs, by being smart enough to know how to capitalize on their looks to get a job that pays them more in a year than I've earned in my whole entire life.

"Some day one of those little cuties could decide she'd like to be the wife of a bright young and handsome politician who might be going places. And decide to make a play for you. Get rid of the wife and move in. Think you'd fall for it, darling?" she said.

"No, of course not," he said at once.

"Well that's nice to hear," she said, 'but I'm not sure I can be sure of that. You may not know the answer yourself. How you'd react if some woman put an effort into it, tried to lure you out of our bed into hers. And if you don't know how you'd react, as I don't want to think you do, I don't know, either, do I?"

By afternoon on the quiet Tuesday after his rancorous allegation of anti-Catholic prejudice at Grey Hills Sunday night, Hilhard in his office at the State House had decided what to do to avenge it. He had called the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and amiably suggested the first stocking of the brook and the river that ran through Grey Hills. The man who took the call and recognized the name of the chairman of Ways and Means had been prudently indifferent to the fact that the stretches of the streams the caller proposed for improvement at taxpayer expense were privately owned, posted off-limits to nonmembers of Grey Hills. The stocking had begun. Delight among the membership who chanced to catch the hatchery trout and deduced their origin was immediate and unfeigned. Hilhard was not allowed to lie in wait; Warren Corey identified him at once as the member deserving the thanks. For the next several years, until mortality put an end to it, the anglers at Grey Hills at Corey's instigation annually held "The Fish Dinner," honoring Dan Hilhard as their benefactor. If they were dissembling, they did it well enough so that he was never able to detect it.

In the years since Hilhard had left the House, no one in the legislature or the governor's cabinet had found the cost of the stocking in the budget for Fisheries and Wildlife, so no one had made a second call to Fisheries and Wildlife threatening public denunciation of the practice as unauthorized and corruptly wasteful. The stocking continued.

"Hit another one, Steve," Julian Sanderson said in the August sunshine, too warmly and indulgently. "Yeah, you're among friends here, Steverino," Pete said heartily and expansively, 'mulligans all around, all day long."

Asshole, Merrion thought disinterestedly. To Hilliard he said: "There, see what I mean?"

Hilliard laughed, releasing his grip on Merrion's shoulders, along with a gust of Courvoisiered breath into the air around them, pulling a chair up at Merrion's left. He sat down: six-two, a hundred-and-eighty-or-ninety pounds, thickening softly around the middle; the black hair starting mostly grey over the ears; a grand smile on the slightly flushed face evincing years of practice but because of the practice showing as well the warm heart behind it and clasped his hands at his waist. "Diversion, Amby," he said. "Julian is for diversion. His mission's to be a guide for the world at play time."