A change of gravity

SEVENTEEN

Leaving his house late in the morning of the third Sunday in August, Merrion was mildly pleased to register another day of sunshine. He began to feel actual cheer. The change surprised him; he'd been resigned to plodding through the day as best he could, resisting anxiety. He went to the grey and white house with the pale yellow front door on Pynchon Hill where Diane Fox had lived with Walter amid much laughter and not just when they had friends over for dinner, either, although there had been a lot of that.

Merrion had always liked Walter Fox, 'always' having commenced in 1972 when he had first begun to get to know the red-haired ruddy-faced man with the bristling red handlebar mustache. Succeeding to the seat Larry Lane had occupied and left to him along with his ownership interest in the Fourmen's Realty Trust he found he had inherited Walter Fox along with the wealth. Fox's place had belonged io his late grandfather, Phil, who had died in '68.

The trust had been set up in September of 1956. The original investors were Charles Spring, Roy Carnes, Larry Lane and Finnis D.L. "Fiddle'

Barrow. Spring did the legal work, drawing up the declaration of trust, originally making his son, Edmund, practicing law in Boston, the nominal administrator, unpaid, omitting the names of the beneficiaries who were the actual trustees. The document made each interest in the trust indivisible in itself, inseparable from the remainder of the corpus, and non-transferable by conveyance or special mention in a will, except by express statement, oral or in writing, addressed to the other trustees, of testamentary intent to make a gift, or by testamentary deed of trust, to take effect in the event of disabling incompetence or death of the beneficiary.

At the initial meeting of the trustees, held on the second Sunday in November at the headquarters of the Barrows Construction Co. at the sand pits in Hampton Falls, Spring had described the trust agreement to the others as a cordon sanitaire. "Discretion is important to us. If one of us dies, as all of us someday surely will, we do not want estate appraisers rummaging around in this operation, asking awkward questions. That's why we're making it a lock-box: very hard to get into; you had to be there. Almost impossible to get out of by yourself unless you're literally willing to die in the attempt."

The instrument provided that in such event, or upon application by a beneficiary or his attorney-in-fact for liquidation of his interest, the value of the interest would be determined by appraisal, and the surviving beneficiaries at their sole option and discretion choose either to admit the decedent's designee to his vacant place, or if for reasons of uncertainty or reservations about his suitability they chose not to, thereupon either by additional capital infusion or by sale of trust assets redeem the interest of the late beneficiary by payment to his successor in interest an amount equal to the value of his prorata share.

The original arrangement soon proved to be geographically unwieldy. For that and other reasons, including perceived risk, in 1961, five years before the statute of limitations would bar state prosecution of any criminal offense possibly committed in connection with construction of the courthouse, Spring had thought it best to suggest to Edmund that he draw up the document substituting Philip Fox of Hampton Pond as the managing trustee of record.

Fox owned and operated the Fox Agency, Real Estate amp; Insurance. Fox's firm had handled the bonds underwriting the courthouse construction, so he had followed the project attentively and was keenly aware of its many ramifications. His agreement to serve as trustee specified that at the end of his first year he would be credited with a management fee of a ten percent ownership of the Fourmen's Trust fund, subject to divestment should he fail for any reason to serve for a total of at least five years. For the next four years thereafter he would annually receive a further interest amounting to two-and-one-half percent of the value of the fund that year, also subject to divestment if he failed to complete the specified term of five years. Thereafter he would participate in gains and losses on equal terms with the original four holders. While his duties as managing trustee would continue, he would cease to receive any additional compensation. Everyone involved in his admission to membership understood the interest he received to be hush money, although Lane was the only one who called it by that name at meetings, causing the others to wince.

Lane though blunt was right. Fox's addition to the trust served prudence as well as managerial efficiency. From his bonding work he knew that the original monies constituting the corpus of the trust consisted entirely of kickbacks from rigged-bid contracts and subcontracts for materials involved in the project, completed in 1957.

The total came to about $135,000, slightly over eleven percent of the total cost of the building and grounds.

Spring conservatively oversaw its enlargement in the bond market. Nine years later he had more than doubled it, to approximately $315,000. On his advice the trustees then voted to begin gradual diversification of their holdings, transferring some of the profits from the bond accounts into common stocks and investing the rest in real estate, both by purchasing undeveloped land and by buying up mortgages insured by the government. In 1970, Barrows had commenced construction of the trust's first cautious venture in long-term ownership of residential real estate, the sixteen-unit apartment building at 1692 Eisenhower Boulevard, at a rock-bottom cost of $7,100 per unit $113,600. The trustees also accepted Spring's recommendation that the trust become more aggressive in the stock market, using about seventy percent of their remaining capital to purchase common stocks issued by companies among the 500 indexed by Standard amp; Poor.

At the close of the 1968 spring meeting, Philip Fox had reported having been badly frightened by a premonition, and to be on the safe side wished to vouch for his grandson's bona fides and ability to keep his mouth shut; in the event of his death, he said, it would be his wish that the surviving original trustees/beneficiaries allow Walter to succeed him as both trustee and beneficiary. The other trustees dutifully scoffed at his superstitious ness but agreed. In November they carried out his wishes, voting to admit Walter, not so incidentally carrying out their preference not to disturb the corpus of the trust as would have been necessary if they had chosen to buy him out.

In 1972, the members convened for the regular spring meeting on the second Sunday in May at Larry Lane's apartment at 1692 Eisenhower Boulevard, he having become too infirm to travel to the Fox Agency offices in Hampton Pond, for more than ten years the customary venue for the semi-annual gatherings. With great difficulty Larry had made a statement. He had written it out on six sheets of paper. Interrupted by coughing, wheezing, choking and gagging, he had needed nearly eleven minutes to deliver it. To his old henchmen it seemed like eleven hours.

"It's no more obvious to you guys now than it's been to me for a long time that this'll be the last meeting I'll attend, and I thank you for coming here so I could do it. When November rolls around, I'll be gone, and damned glad of it, too. I hope I wont have to, but if I do, the pain gets so bad I can't stand it, I'll see to the end of it myself. I've been on the brink of that many times as it is, and I can see myself making that choice. And if I'm too far gone to do what needs doing, I've got a friend I can count on to help me. My family would too, in a jiffy, you bet, if I ever asked them, but I'd never let the bastards have the satisfaction.

"I recommend, if the Man gives you a choice, take the heart attack, or the stroke. Either one's got to be better'n this. The drawback of going that way is it's too sudden to make any plans; tell your friends how you want things done. Way I'm going, I do have some time. "S the only good thing about it. I can tell you I'd like my place to go to Amby Merrion. I realize he's a good deal younger than everyone but you, Walter, but you'll all get along fine with him, I promise you.

"I recall being in the same position with all of you except Walter in April, Sixty-eight, when Phil Fox told us he'd had some kind of waking-dream or something, terrible premonition. He said he'd never put much stock in them before, but he'd never had one this powerful, and it'd really rattled him. He said he hoped, naturally, it'd turn out to be dead wrong, and that come November wed be making fun of him, laughing how foolish he'd been. But if it turned out this one was right, and he did pass away before then that was how he said it; he said "passed away," and then he gave a little shudder, like he'd had a sudden chill; I can see him, plain as day his wish would be that we let Walter take his place. And then he spoke very highly of you, Walter, and so when it turned out that Phil's awful hunch'd been right, we naturally honored his wishes. And we've found out that his judgment was correct.

"Now since I'm having all this trouble talking to you, I'm going to cut it a little short here. I'd like it if you'd all consider that I've now said about Amby all the same good things that Phil had to say about Walter. He's a good guy. You can trust him. He keeps his word. He's gone out of his way to be a friend to me, faithful as could be, making sure I'm as comfortable as possible, doing everything he can. And he did it almost a year before he had any idea that there might be something pretty good in it for him. He's a decent man. He's got good character: by that I mean he's loyal, and if you tell him something's confidential, he keeps it that way. And that's about all that I've got to say. Except to say, Fiddle, that this's probably the last time I'll piss you off at a meeting, by calling our little arrangement 'the Foreskin fucking Trust' as I've tried to do at least once, each time we've met, to see how mad you always get. Oh, and ask you all to join me for a few drinks — farewell drinks I guess they'd be. And thank you for how you've always treated me, for being my good friends."

When Merrion succeeded to Larry's place in the fall of 1972, the value of the trust had more than doubled again. Walter Fox, having inherited not only his grandfather's interest but also his managerial responsibilities, conservatively estimated that each of the five shares was worth about $143,000. The corpus then consisted of the apartment building, each month grossing $6,160 in rental income Larry had insisted that his share of trust income be debited $308.00 each month he lived in number 11, eighty percent of the rent anyone else would have had to pay.

By then Big Roy Carnes was dead. His son, Roy Junior, Milliard's predecessor in the House, had retired from the State Senate as chairman of the Committee on Post Audit and Oversight to become chief executive officer for financial operations of The Buehler Corporation, a New England textile company then completing its changeover from manufacturing to importing fabrics, mostly from the Far East, and beginning its relocation to Anderson, South Carolina. Two of the original trustee/beneficiaries, Chassy Spring and Fiddle Barrow, still survived, but Spring was in ill health in a rest home in Gloucester, near his son's home in Marblehead. Spring did not attend Merrion's inaugural, and would die within the year.

There had been three purposes for that meeting, held in Fox's main office in the white six-room bungalow with green shutters and a white picket fence that the Fox Agency occupied in the center of Hampton Pond (in Canterbury, Hampton Falls and Cumberland, the Fox Agency operated storefront satellite offices providing coverage extending into Holyoke, Springfield, Chicopee and Amherst and Northampton). Carnes, citing the demands his new position made on his time and energies, and the imminence of his permanent departure from New England, had invoked the buy-out clause. Stating in his letter to Walter Fox his confidence that Fox and the others would give him 'honest weight," he had waived his right to demand appointment of a disinterested appraiser, noting in passing that he had 'often wondered why the hell Chassy ever thought it would ever be a good idea to give an outsider access to the books; what if he got curious and decided he wanted to know where the dough'd originally come from?"

Fiddle Barrow offered two proposals, prompted in part by his own increasing frailty but precipitated by Spring's incapacitation. The first had been to convert the securities into shares of a moderately aggressive mutual fund, Spring no longer being able to supervise the trust's investments and no one else among the trustee-beneficiaries appearing to have either the time to assume his oversight of market investments or the acumen to do it with confidence. The second had been to cede the management of the property at 1692 Eisenhower Boulevard to Valley Better Residences, Inc." so that thereafter the only task remaining to the trustees would be negotiation and deposit of the checks representing their profits.

Merrion, Fox and Barrow voted unanimously to convert the stock into shares of the Dreyfus Fund. Conformably to Edmund Spring's written statement of his father's wishes 'he said to have him vote the same way as everyone else does, whatever they want to do' Barrow cast Spring's vote as his proxy. They further voted to direct the Dreyfus Fund to transfer shares in the account to be established in the name of the trust in the amount of $143,000 to Roy Carnes, Jr." and to put the apartment building under Valley Better management.

Neither Merrion nor Fox then or later had perceived any need to divulge their common interest to outsiders. But each time Merrion after that went into any kind of community meeting or social occasion not knowing in advance exactly what he was in for, and found that Walter Fox was also involved, he was glad. Because they had that one financial thing in common, and treated it as clandestine, to Merrion it seemed they had a bond of secret knowledge. Fox seemed to share that belief. Each of them knew that the other possessed a reserve capability Tuck you' money hidden from the world, and hoarded the knowledge along with his own treasure.

As Merrion's business to the casual observer would have seemed to consist principally if not entirely of his job at the courthouse, so Walter's had appeared to be the Fox Agency, the insurance and real estate brokerage he'd inherited at the age of twenty-nine from his grandfather, Philip, in 1968.

On July 18th, 1968, the day of Philip Fox's funeral in the Episcopal Church of St. John in Hampton Pond, government offices and small businesses there and in Hampton Falls, Canterbury, Cumberland and neighboring sections of Holyoke, Chicopee, Northampton and Springfield displayed hand-lettered signs in their windows and on their doors:

"Closed 11-1, in Memory of Phil Fox." Or just: "Philip Fox. 1882–1968." A columnist for the Springfield Union wrote: "Phil Fox died having spent a lifetime demonstrating, not declaiming, to all who knew him his unshakable belief that faith without good works is useless."

Even Fred Dillinger eulogized him. In his Transcript column he described Fox as 'the man who singled himself out if he was not first recruited, as he usually was to lead the area when it was time to solicit donations. It didn't seem to matter to him what the cause was.

To renew hope for a family burned-out of its home or a shop owner out of his business; to rally support for a fund-raising drive to send the Canterbury All Stars to Williamsport, Pa." for the Little League World Series; the Hampton Pond High School band to Washington for the Cherry Blossom Festival, or to New York for the St. Paddy's Day Parade. And when someone said to him, "Phil, you're not a Catholic, and you're not Irish, either," he said, "You're mistaken, my friend. On Saint Patrick's Day I'm Irish everybody is." He acted on his own each year to see to it that every hard-luck family had a turkey on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and a ham for Easter, too. Phil Fox may not have been a saint in Heaven's eyes, but to those of us on earth, he looked a lot like one. Phil Fox will be missed."

That column ran the day before the funeral. Reporting 'the enormous turnout to bid good-bye to Phil," the Transcript story said: "He did not confine his good works to his home town of Hampton Pond. He considered himself a local resident of every community where the Fox Agency did business. Whenever Canterbury or 'the Falls' or Cumberland had a question whether there'd be cash enough to help the poor or the unfortunate, or achieve a common civic goal, Canterbury and the other towns always knew they really had no question Canterbury had Phil Fox.

His grandson, Walter, will have giant shoes to fill, and as we express our sympathy, all of us will wish him well."

Walter was the successor because his father, Andy, had been among Marines killed at the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean Conflict.

Phil's other son, Walter's Uncle Cameron, was an episcopal priest, vicar of a well-to-do parish in Litchfield, Connecticut; he had never had any interest in the family business, 'anything involving actual work," Phil sometimes mildly said.

The consensus of the business community at the time of Phil's death was that Walter was a mere untested kid, too callow to take on the enterprise. His alternative was to sell the agency; there were aggressive bidders. He was aware of the consensus and it made him timid, but the operation of the agency was the only work he knew. At twenty-nine he felt too old to start a new career. Since he was the sole heir, it was his call to make. Nagged and hindered by his fear that the elders were right and he would make a disastrous mistake, he decided nonetheless to proceed.

The agency had rewarded his cautious management, perking along nicely and continuing to return decent profits, growing at a steady rate of two to three percent a year, just about keeping pace with inflation or staying a bit ahead of it. At first that gave him quiet satisfaction.

Then after a few more years he became somewhat more assertive. He began to think his instincts might in fact be fairly good, well worth relying on.

His first wife, Jacqueline, was the first to discover he had changed.

Having become 'terminally bored' in Canterbury, she had decided to unload her life with him there for a more stimulating career in TV production at station WTIC in Hartford. She was perfectly astonished when he hired Sam Evans to counter her libel for divorce with a vigorous one of his own. First he alleged desertion, claiming that her twelve-hour daily absence commuting to a ten-hour workday at Independence Plaza constructively amounted to desertion of his bed and board. Then he flabbergasted her by seeking custody of their child, and undisputed ownership and occupation of the marital domicile in Hampton Pond alleging she had proved herself an unfit mother by constructively leaving him to raise their daughter by himself.

Then he really stunned her: he won, on both prayers for relief (Jacqueline had made the right career choice for herself, though; in the three years she spent in Hartford, she displayed an affinity for her new work that made her professional catnip to the people building CNN in Atlanta; lured to Peach tree Plaza, she vanished into Georgia, never to be seen again north of Washington, D.C.).

Apparently emboldened by results, Walter as Merrion saw it began to act 'like a guy who's discovered that he doesn't really have to give a shit." He developed the confidence to admit freely he'd not only started out but remained 'wishy-washy, scared to death of making some dumb-ass greenhorn mistake that'll wreck the business' and that 'about the biggest change' he'd 'ever dared to make was adding on the logo," the red brush-stroke profile of a fox that now adorned the agency's For Sale signs and stationery While he freely confessed his opinion that its modest improvement in prosperity under his direction probably had more to do with regional population increases and his grandfather's reputation than with anything he had done, he began to think and soon after that to say that still he must deserve at least some credit for having been smart enough to leave a good thing alone.

One night at the house on Pynchon Hill, after everyone else had gone home and Diane was in the pantry cleaning up, he had poured 'one last nightcap' of Old Smuggler for himself and a Jack Daniel's for Mernon — "Meaning this'll make the third, for each of you," Diane said, from the kitchen and said that 'of course the thing that no one ever seems to notice, when they talk about your business and how it doesn't seem to've gotten much bigger, sort of sneering at you, is at least that little business that you got is still there, still chugging along, going strong, just like it always has been.

"It may've been a little engine, when you took control of it, and that may still be all it is, but when you got your grubby little paws on it, back then, it was the little engine that could, and by Jesus it still can. A lot of others like it, owners had the big ambitious plans: well, where're they today? Not around any more where could they've all gone? Gone belly-up, is where, not in business anymore. I think survival counts for something. I'll take it any day."

When Walter died, at the age of forty-two, Diane knew there was more to his estate than the house and the insurance agency, but she wasn't sure what it was or how much it was worth. He had told her something about a twenty-percent interest in some sort of a real estate and stock investment partnership, not itemized but left to her under the residuary clause of his will, along with the house on Pynchon Hill and two-thirds of the value of the Fox Agency. She had realized her understanding was imperfect, but left it that way because she hadn't wanted to seem to be too interested in what her prospects were if her robust husband died young. It seemed so very unlikely. Therefore about all she knew about the trust was that some time ago his grandfather had somehow acquired an interest in an investment consortium that continued to yield steady income, and that Merrion was in it too.

Once or twice when she had rebuked Walter for regularly having more to drink than was good for him, whenever Merrion was among the people they'd had over for the evening, he had tried to excuse it by telling her that he and Merrion were 'more'n just ordinary business associates.

We're also pals, we get a kick outta each other. A man should have pals; a man's gotta have pals. And even though I know you don't care much for Amby, pals're what we're gonna stay."

She said she knew he needed to have friends and if he wanted to consider Amby one of them, that was fine by her. She said whether she liked Amby or not had nothing to do with what she was talking about, which was his 'habit of getting absolutely sloshed every time Amby comes here to dinner. Every single time he comes, you two wind up getting plastered. Don't you worry about him driving home when you've gotten yourselves in that condition, you say you're such friends.

Aren't you afraid something'll happen to him? That he'll get hurt or maybe arrested?"

Walter had laughed. "How many cops around here you think're gonna go and arrest the clerk of court? They know him too well. They'd never do that to him, never charge him with drunk driving. They did pull him over, they wouldn't arrest him. All they'd do's make him move over and let one of them drive him home, and the other one follow, the cruiser."

"He still could get hurt, though," she said. "Or he could hurt somebody else. He shouldn't be driving that way. If you think I don't want him around, well, I'm telling you, that's the reason. It's because of the drinking you two seem to do whenever you get together. I get so I don't want to invite him, even though you like him, he's your friend. "Cause I know what'll happen: You'll both get rip-roaring drunk."

Walter refused to concede her point. He said. "Amby and I have a good time together. That's what friends're for. Having fun with them, the short time we're all on the earth. One of the things, anyway. If anything ever happened to me, even though I'm sure he knows you don't like him all that much, if something ever happened to me, other guys we know'd forget all about you, but Amby'd take care of you."

Walter seemed very certain when he said that and it stuck in her mind.

So after Walter died, even though she believed his long uproarious evenings with Merrion had hastened his death, she went to Mernon and asked him what he knew.

He told her she would most likely be surprised when she fully understood what Walter had been up to, as in fact she was. She'd been startled to begin with when an appraiser pegged the market value of the Fox Agency at $830,000, about $200,000 more than Walter several years before had casually guessed it might be worth, but the price had been duly and unhesitatingly paid by the real estate subsidiary of a nationally advertised real estate conglomerate making it the western Massachusetts satellite in its linkage coast' to-coast. Her share of that sale was a little over $556,000, good for an annual income of slightly over $50,000. To her that was a lot of money and it made her feel a little guilty for having yelled at Walter what she now recalled as 'a few times' when he'd gotten on her nerves.

When she learned that those mixed stock and realty trust investments Walter had airily described amounted to just under another $192,000, she was mortified. Combined with the interest from investment of her two-thirds share of the proceeds from the sale of the agency, it would give her an income of nearly $73,000 a year before she brought home any pay from her practice. She had lived with Walter only for about eleven years and she was beginning to fear that soon people would find out she really hadn't known him very well at all. But then, as Merrton had reminded her, they couldn't very well say she'd married Walter for his money; she'd never dreamed he had it.

"Or his cockeyed politics, either," she said.

Merrion laughed and told her Walter's conservative politics had been 'irrelevant. Walter always made me laugh." He said that Dan Hilhard really had hated Walter's views and meant it when he sometimes said he couldn't stand the man. "Some of the things that Walter said absolutely infuriated him. If he was pissed off when he left your house Saturday night, he'd still be pissed off when I saw him on Monday. Took me days to calm him down."

He said that if Diane 'hadn't become such a wonderful cook you never would've seen Dan. Never would've laid eyes on the man. And he would never've put up with Walter. Of course Dan can be a major toothache too, he gets started on something. There were lots of times I thought that if Walter didn't finally say something that'd make Danny haul off and hit him, then what'd happen'd be Danny'd do it, say something that'd get Walter so mad he'd hit Danny in the mouth."

He said he had told Hilliard many times that he habitually carried his insistence on political orthodoxy too far, especially when the cost of it would have been good times and laughs. Merrion told her Hilhard said this attitude proved Merrion lacked principle. "Politically speaking, Danny says, I'm an easy lay. He's probably right. Compared to him, at least. But when he let Walter get on his nerves, Walter took it as a challenge. They deserved each other."

Walter often said he had voted five times 'enthusiastically' for Richard M. Nixon, three of them as president of the United States. One night he said Nixon had been one of the two best American presidents to serve in the 20th century. Hilliard said he assumed Walter's other favorite was Herbert Hoover. Walter had blinked and said, actually, no, his other nominee was FDR. "The litmus isn't which party the guy belongs to; it's how he reacts to the problems that the country faces while he's president. The third best may've been Gerry Ford. He gave us rest when we needed it."

"That happened at your house," Merrion said to Diane. "You were feeding us this gorgeous fillet of beef. I forgot what the wine was Walter opened. It was red and I had a lot of it; that much I know.

When Walter said that, Danny was astounded. The idea that Walter might actually have something serious and reasonable to say about politics astonished him."

Walter also knew lots of local gossip and had a fund of dirty, racial, ethnic and religious jokes that he told with practiced elan. He followed and discussed professional and collegiate sports with discernment; ate and drank hospitably; and was as ready to denounce a blowhard on his own side as he was to ridicule a fake on the other.

Those assets, together with his regular and unabashed reports of fresh misfortunes and new humiliations he had suffered on the golf course, had twice inspired Merrion to suggest that he allow Merrion to sponsor him to fill a vacancy left at Grey Hills by the death of a member (Hilhard, getting wind of Memon's first offer, said he'd blackball Fox if it came to that, and Merrion had been concerned enough to remind Hilliard how he'd gotten into Grey Hills, and tell him if he did spike Fox, "I'll get even with you'). But each time Walter after giving the invitation some thought had declined, citing the comfort-level of his second-generation old-shoe status at the Holyoke Country Club, and his 'pagan's apprehension that taking a dead man's place could be dangerous,

just asking for trouble. Might tempt the ever-present faraway fellow in the bright nightgown, you know? "Goddamnit, if Fd've wanted that slot occupied, I wouldn't've snuffed Harold now, would I?"

So Merrion had been genuinely saddened when he heard of Walter's death, and had meant it when he told Diane that he was sorry. She had patted his hand and said she knew he had been one of Walter's favorite bad companions, and expressed her opinion 'that if he only hadn't had quite so many friends like you, or enjoyed them quite so much, he might still be alive today." But she said she didn't bear Merrion any grudge: "He was a big boy, after all. He knew what he was doing."

In her reconfiguration of herself after Walter's death, Diane became convinced the house provided spiritual strength. That was definitely something new for her. Walter at her urging had acquired it, a Fox Agency exclusive listing, as their wedding present to each other. He was quite aware its splendid kitchen was not the only reason why she preferred it to the house in Hampton Pond he had inherited from Phil.

The other was the fact that that house had been tainted by his first wife's occupancy. He did not say that to Diane (he told Merrion once with some rueful nostalgia that he thought the principal reason he'd 'married Jaquie was she had these big dreamy bedroom eyes." When Merrion said that was probably as good a reason as any for a first marriage, Walter said it probably was not, 'but it was as good a one as I needed at the time. Then I found out that what I thought was sexiness was just astigmatism, very easily corrected. As soon as she got her glasses and saw what I was up to, she turned on me, got mean').

As Diane had come to see it, the two of them by having raised in the new house his daughter, Rachel, by his first marriage along with their two sons, with no more numerous losses of temper and exchanges of sharp remarks, soon regretted, than most hard-working, reasonably fortunate families manage to survive without permanent harm had in the process made a kind of emotional investment in the building, and so had acquired spiritual equity in the very lumber, lathing, plaster and cement of it.

She had needed time to steady herself after Walter's inconsiderately sudden departure (Dan Hilhard, putting aside her part in the disruption of his personal life and therefore his political career, cheered her a little at the wake by muttering that while of course he was sorry,

"Republicans're like that, you know; always afraid if they hang around too long they'll get stuck with the check; so they duck out of everything early'). To go with the time she had required as well a good deal of help and support from longtime friends.

In that gathering of wits she had found herself to her surprise depending upon Ambrose Merrion emotionally. Walter had had many more secrets than she had suspected, and Amby was the only man she knew herself who also knew the secrets. "It was insidious," she said, when she realized later what had happened to her while she was engaged in doing something else. Coming over time to believe gratefully that the history she had in the house on Pynchon Hill would be a major source of strength, as long as she stayed put, she had also gotten used to seeing Merrion around in it a lot. When she had finished remaking her life to accommodate Walter's abrupt withdrawal from it, a little over a year later, she found Merrion had worked his way into it ('wormed," she said once, to him, but he looked a little hurt so she didn't use that term again). Not into the place in her life that had been Walter's, not by any means she had closed that off- but still in it, just the same, with a new place of his own.

"Animism, I know," she said of her new attitude toward the house, preferring to keep conversations light until she had become sure enough of what she thought of Memon's new importance to want to talk about it.

"Early symptom of the onset of feeblemindedness. Or reversion to the primitive state. Next thing you know, I'll be painting myself blue and running around out in the woods with no clothes on, worshiping resonant trees, talismanic squirrels and sacred rocks. But a good house or any other place does have power to comfort, the solace of familiarity. It doesn't have to have a real soul of its own to do that, but it has to have some special something most houses don't seem to have character.

Most of them're just buildings, frames with walls and roof sections hung on them. When you get one that's more than that, you shouldn't part with it. It would be a sin against the Great Spirit."

Merrion during the same period had been getting used to being around Diane a lot. In the course of helping her to master the financial matters that Walter had covertly managed out of her sight (as he had prudently kept them from Jaquie's view as well, thus saving more than a few dollars in the divorce settlement, obeying Larry Lane's rule against confiding financial data to possibly treacherous kinfolk with no honest need to know it), he grew accustomed to spending time with her, several hours during the weekend or an evening or two during the week. He enjoyed his new habit of her company, and saw no reason to discontinue seeing her after they had rearranged her assets under her control.

By then he had long since recovered very nicely and completely from the real but transient sorrow he had felt at Walter's death. He had not become happy that Walter had died, but he admitted to himself that he would have been seriously inconvenienced if Walter, as much fun as he'd always been in life, had somehow managed to come back. Life goes on, Merrion reminded himself firmly, when he felt his first and only feathery twinge of guilt after an evening of enjoying the company of Walter's widow. Walter knew that and he left it just the same, and it went on without him. Poor judgment on his part; probably wishes now he hadn't done it. Tough shit for him.

Once a week, most often Thursdays because he seldom could be absolutely sure until late Friday afternoon that he wouldn't have to be available Friday and Saturday evenings for bail hearings, he invited Diane to join him after work for drinks and dinner, usually at the Old Post Road Tavern his established familiarity there had bred superior service and access to special dishes off the menu.

When she resumed entertaining two years after Walter's death, it was assumed Merrion would act as host. From time to time she cooked for him on winter weekend evenings. Once or twice each summer, as he was going to do on that third Sunday in August, he drove her out to Tanglewood to hear the concerts her stepdaughter had selected as her birthday gift each March, and she made dinner reservations for them afterwards at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge.

Merrion more or less assumed that she would be available for any outings, the regular Thursday dinners or movies on the spur-of-the-moment. He would have been disappointed if she had said she had another commitment, but she never did. She would have been at least irked had he pleaded a prior social engagement made it impossible for him to bring over a bottle of red wine and share a pheasant she had bought on a whim and just finished roasting, but every time she had an impulse and called to invite him to do some such thing, he was always ready to do it. "We do pretty well for each other, don't we, Amby?" she said to him very early one morning, kissing him safe-home just inside the half-opened door. "Not badly at all," he replied.

Hilliard, meddling in his business as usual, asked him one evening idly in the bar at Grey Hills showing off for other people standing around within earshot having drinks after a budget committee meeting if he was 'still at it, keeping company with the Widow Fox," knowing the answer.

When Merrion said that he was, adding that Hilliard damned right well knew it, he was vexed to feel his ears and cheeks getting hot. Thus rewarded, Hilliard prying further had asked him why he kept on seeing her. "An excellent cook," Hilliard said, 'but she can be a controlling woman."

Merrion said irritably that he guessed it was something that he did, not something he had thought about doing, so therefore he supposed the reason that he did it was because he wanted to. Hilliard had nodded and said grandly that his many years of extensive experience and close personal observation enabled him to state unequivocally and without fear of contradiction that that was indisputably the very best reason, bar none, that Amby Merrion had ever given for going out with a woman.

That brought a little polite applause and a 'hear, hear' or two.

Merrion thought about it for a moment and said that the reason he had tolerated Hilliard for so many years was that from time to time not very often, but still, now and then he showed absolutely brilliant insight into human nature, and this was one of those times.

Merrion in the course of helping Diane through her sorrow had found her opinions to be based upon good instincts, and he got into the habit of seeking them when confronting important decisions of his own. It was natural enough, he supposed; after all, she was used to considering other people's situations and giving her advice, that being the way she'd made her living and career for a good many years. And she was obviously pleased, quietly flattered, when he consulted her. Once, more or less in obedience to some shabby impulse learned in politics, he supposed no point in having an advantage if you're not going to try to use it he tried to subvert her good will and affection. One evening late in 1992, over dinner at the Tavern, he had asked her advice about what he ought to do with Polly's house.

By then eleven years had passed since Walter's death, so there had been no question that Diane had recovered from the loss. The shattering decline into silence that would necessitate Polly's admission to St.

Mary's on the Hilltop had set in, rendering progressively more irrelevant his extreme reluctance 'to put her in the home'; he had reached a sort of marker in his life. But depressing as it was, the event had nonetheless been predictable for a long time; he had seen it coming much as Dan and Mercy Hilliard had known despairingly long before the day arrived that sooner or later they would have to put their daughter Donna in an institution providing long-term care. So he did not have the excuse that he had been dazed in shock that evening when he said what he should not have, asking Diane what he should do.

"You should move right back into it," Diane said immediately. "That's a good house, just like my house is a good house. That place you're living in right now," a large garden court apartment in the Old Wisdom House overlooking Hampton Pond, 'may be where the swells all want to go when they retire, half the year playing golf and shuffleboard in Florida, the other half back here playing golf and lying about their grandchildren. But you'll never be one of those silly men in colored pants with white belts and shoes. Besides, you're not old enough."

"Well," he said, 'the golf I could handle with pleasure, but it looks like I probably wont have the grandchildren."

"Looking for sympathy?" she said. "Won't get it from me. Rachel's always apologizing for not bringing her two back here more often, "so they can get to know you." Uh huh. "Perfectly all right," I always say. "Time enough for us to become dear friends when they go to Harvard. Then they can drive out and see me."

"Nothing wrong with where you live now, it's a very stylish place. But no matter what you have somebody do to it, it'll never be a good house, the kind of place you hang onto and go back to, because it's where you live, and belong. What you need's the sort of place that hangs onto you; that's what I really mean. It keeps you, not you, it, and that's what keeps you going strong."

"And you think I'm going to need one of those of my own," he said. He had been ashamed of himself even as he said it. It was arguably excusable 'never any harm in asking' but just the same it had also been a cheap dodge to take advantage of her compassionate mood in order to wheedle something out of her, something that she didn't want to give him.

She'd raised both eyebrows and gazed at him over the big white plate of veal scallops in cream sauce, and then after a brief but unmistakably reproving silence, she had snickered. "Amby," she had said, 'really now, of course you will. Of course you'll need your place to live. Of course you need a house."

So the terms of their non-aggression pact, 'our treaty," she called it, after that little stutter had resumed evolution along the lines they had begun to take, arriving at it fairly soon after Walter's death.

"Look, Amby," she had said to him she was a practical woman making coffee in her kitchen, using her foot to steer her possessive grey-and-black striped tiger-cat along the mopboard under the sink so that she wouldn't step on it; she had called Merrion Saturday morning and asked him to come over two days after they had gone to bed together the first time because that seemed to her what should be done next.

"This sex business: we've got to talk about it. Come to some kind of agreement we both understand. Or else it's going to get out of control and cause all kinds of problems, maybe end up ruining us. I don't want that to happen. I don't think you do, either. Tell me you don't either, all right? Humor me, at least, and say it, even if you're not really sure yet. This is important to me. I'm surprised how important it is."

"It's important to me, too," he had said, sitting down at her kitchen table, and it was. Having left her very early Friday morning in the still darkness so as to spare her attentive early-rising neighbors the effort they surely would have made to deduce the implications of the presence of what she called his 'flashy car' in her driveway in the sunrise on his way home he had gradually begun to understand that he didn't know what he ought to do next, how to act or what to say the next time he saw her; arrive with an armload of roses or act as though nothing remarkable had taken place. He was slightly flustered to find that mattered to him. As it hadn't mattered, he realized, in the aftermath of what had become a fair number of other sexual friendships he had enjoyed over the course of what he was now somewhat startled to notice had somehow turned into quite a number of years.

"Thirty of 'em, in fact, give or take," he said to Hilliard. "And I have to say it's been quite a while since I can remember being actually concerned the next day about how the lady actually felt about the fun we had last night. Not since Sunny went and died on me, I guess. What was there to get all concerned about? All it was was just getting laid now and then. That's how the grown-ups have fun. And if we should run into each other again, or maybe call up and make sure we did that, well, maybe wed fuck again. Or then again, maybe not. If the time ever came then when we hadda new chance, wed see how we felt. "Inna meantime, many thanks, I hadda good time. Appreciate you lookin' out for me like that."

"That was the way that it worked. There was this one woman I got so I knew pretty well at the New England Regional Meetings one year, and she was just real hot to trot. So we connected, and for the whole three days of that conference there up at Wentworth-by-the-Sea, that is what we did: we fucked our brains out.

She had her regular steady boyfriend back home in Portland. He was a lawyer and she had no complaints at all; he took as good care of her as he possibly could good swift dash inna bloomers two or three times a week. Regular as he could be, but that hadda be his limit. He was married, and either his wife wasn't dumb enough so she would actually let him pack a change of clothes and get out of her sight for an overnight trip for fear he might not come back at all or else he didn't feel he could neglect his practice for three days at a stretch, I'm not really sure. Whatever it was, I wasn't complaining. She wanted her cookies and I wanted mine and we found we could make a deal. A loose woman at loose ends: I take her as a gift from God.

"She was back the next year, and the year after that, and so was I, naturally, and both times we picked up like wed never left off. The year in-between conferences, there's been nothin', no phone calls, no letters, no nothing; it's like for each other we don't exist except up in New Hampshire in June. But that once a year when we came back for the meetings, we came back all of the way. It was just the goddamnedest thing.

"The fourth year she didn't come back. I don't know what happened to her. Maybe the lawyer's wife finally found out and shot her or something like that. Or he divorced the bride and they got together. I was kind of afraid to start asking' around; thought it might look funny, you know? But it seems kind of strange, when you think about it: During those three years inna course of nine days I prolly fucked her thirty times. We were young; we did it like there was no tomorrow.

And today I don't know if she's alive or dead, and she's the same way about me, and I bet she's no more upset than I am. It was straight sex, no more'n that.

"Well except for Sunny, that's how all of them were for me; that's how I looked at it, and I've been happy. I've been a contented man. Now it seems like I'm not looking at it that way any more. Something here seems to've changed."

"See, I don't belong here, like you do," Diane said. "In this town. In this valley. Even though I've been here, more'n quite a while, it's not like I belong here. Or I didn't belong here, at least, when I first came. I just sort of settled in for a while, and at some point after that discovered I had stayed. As though I'd gone to sleep and when I woke up, here's where I was. Where else would I open my practice? And after that Walter was here. So when I decided that I was with Walter, I also realized that I'd probably be here for the rest of my life. I was at rest; where I belong became irrelevant.

"Now I'm not at rest anymore. I'm not saying I don't like it, not that, but I am confused. When I started thinking Friday morning about what we did Thursday night, I had kind of a hard time keeping my mind on my patients' problems which is what they're paying me for."

"Wait a minute," Merrion said. "What is this you "don't belong here"?"

Merrion said. "Sure you do. You've been here for a long time. Close to thirty years by now, or so, pretty close to it. If you and Walter weren't together when I first came to the court here, I know he was, and you must've gotten here pretty soon after that. Because I've been in that courthouse now for about thirty years, and, I'm not saying that you're old, now, but you've been here a long time."

She laughed. "It's just dawned on you, hasn't it?" she said. "Just hitting you now. I can see you thinking it. "My God, what the hell've I done? I've been to bed with an older woman. She's practically old enough to be my mother."

"Oh boy," he said. "Diane, I hate to tell you this, but the fact of the matter is: you're wrong, very wrong. Women that I've always hung around with've generally been about my age, within three or four years of how old I am. Don't get me mixed up with my friend. I haven't hung around the schoolyard since I got out of school. I'm actually a very nice guy."

She said "Oh." She sat down at the table in the kitchen opposite him and gazed at him for a while and then she frowned and looked at her hands and said: "No, I know that. Or else I don't know that. Oh, I don't know what I know." She looked up at him again. "I didn't mean for this to happen," she said.

"But you just said…" he said.

"I know what I said," she said.

"Well, now I'm confused," he said. "First you said it was important to you and that now we've slept together, we have to get things straight and have some rules, and that was fine with me. And now you're telling me instead it's something else. A mistake or something."

"Amby," she said, 'before Walter died, I'd seen you a lot but I didn't really know you very well. I'd never really thought about you as my friend; whether you were someone I knew and trusted, and wanted to have as my friend; only about you as one of Walter's friends. When Walter died; after the shock wore off and I'd started to get my bearings and so forth, well, I certainly hoped sex would be a part of my life again I'm a normal, healthy, adult woman — but I didn't really expect… I didn't know, I didn't have anyone in mind. I didn't have any idea, who it would be with. That I'd be with in this new part of my life.

"But I have to be honest with you: I didn't think it would be you. Now don't be hurt; I didn't think it wouldn't be you, either. You were never; it was never part of my plan, not that I had any plan, really, but… I don't know what I mean here. To get involved with you. As lovers, I mean."

"Why not?" he said.

"Now you are hurt," she said, 'and I didn't mean that to happen either.

It's just that you and the people you know and the life you've always led, you were someone who was completely different from Walter. Whether you knew it or not, you were sort of a romantic hero to Walter. Do you understand what I'm saying? Walter was exactly what he looked like: a small-town, small-business, family man. His whole world was family, and the business that his family'd started, and the small towns where the family lived and knew the people, ran the business. His whole life was in the Four Towns; it always had been he liked it that way.

"It was how I liked it, too. I'd grown up in a settled environment in Minneapolis, a very conventional family. But once I went to Madison to go to college that phase for me was over. I became rootless. I had adventures, I guess you could say, and I enjoyed them. But after some years I began to worry. I didn't have any base of my own. So Walter's Four Towns were nice for me to come back to, an orderly world where people stayed in the same place and you could depend on them. Not the same world but the kind of world I'd grown up in. I don't think I'd ever been really afraid before that, uneasy, maybe, but with Walter I felt safe again. He was an utterly settled man. When I was with him I knew everything was going to be all right. I never dreamed he'd die so soon.

"He admired you. You, and as much as he fought with him all the time, Danny. When Mercy kicked him out last year, he was the only person I know, man or woman except, I'm assuming, you who was on Danny's side.

The two of us had some sharp words over that. In a way you two were Walter's imaginary friends. You and Danny lived around here just like he did; you moved in the same world and you acted like everyone else, but you were also different. You were pirates. He liked his life all right, but it was quiet; there was action in the lives you two were living they were exciting: You were in politics.

"In a way he wanted to be like you, or thought he did anyway, and because you let him be friends with you, he could feel he was like you, a little bit. He thought you brought a touch of glamor to his life. He was absolutely fascinated by the people that you know, all the rogues and rascals you and Dan did battle with, in your daily life. He envied you. I didn't mind that, as long as he didn't actually try to be like you; he couldn't've done it. He wasn't cut out for the rough and tumble, and deep down inside he knew it. But when he had too much to drink and started talking big; that pose he liked to put on, pretending he was part of your life, the turmoil, and the drama, and the thrills, well, he just loved doing that. For a while he forgot who he really was."

"But you didn't," Merrion said, 'you didn't love having him do it."

"I didn't encourage it, no," she said. "But I didn't try to discourage it, either. I don't think I could've, if I'd tried, but I didn't really try. He had a great time, a wonderful time, pretending he was one of you. But then you all went home. The next day he was back here with me, hung-over but with me, the solid Walter I'd liked the minute that I met him, and grew to love, and married. Of course I was glad he'd had fun. But I hoped he'd never change.

"And so when he died, well, I had no idea of winding up with you. When I felt it starting to happen, felt myself getting attached to you, I hoped I was getting it wrong. But I wasn't. I did become attached to you. Wanting to or not. And so now I have to deal with it, that's all. We have to deal with it now."

"Yes," he said.

"Be patient with me, Amby," she said. "I do have a good heart, you know."

The young man she had met and started living with during her second year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the spring of 1963 had been a graduate assistant in the department of economics assigned to teach a basic survey course to freshmen, 'very bright and very intense, and very Marxist, too." She said his name was "Tommy."

In February of that year he learned that he had won a fellowship to study for a year at the London School of Economics, 'which sort of disappointed him, because he'd wanted Cambridge. But I thought it was wonderful, and I thought he was wonderful and we were wonderful, and when it was time for him to go I went right along with him. Maybe I was right who knows? Maybe the two of us actually were wonderful, just like I thought, and therefore when we lived in Saint John's Wood, flat broke, it wasn't really cold and dreary, like it began to seem half an hour or so after we got there. Maybe it was magical, whee, just like I pretended.

"Tommy couldn't pull it off, believing it was magic. I suppose it's just possible he was right, and I was silly. That fellowship was for one, not two, and my stuffy, settled Three-M parents my father was a scientist for Three-M back home in strait-laced old Minneapolis had cut off my allowance when I dropped out of school.

"They really took a very narrow view of things. They said they didn't recall seeing anything in the Wisconsin catalogue that described a year of shacking up in London as the third year of what they'd agreed to pay for me to get, a four-year, liberal arts education.

"They'd thought of that as their biggest present to me, the foundation of the rest of my life. After I graduated if I still really wanted to apply to Juilliard and see if I was a good enough oboeist to become a professional musician, I could do that. And if I didn't want to do that, or did but didn't get in, then I'd be able to teach music in high school somewhere, because I'd have that solid college education. I'd be able to make a living for myself like a responsible adult. But I'd only completed half of the bargain. Now I was living in sin and being free in London. So therefore no more money.

"I don't know or maybe I just don't remember what it was exactly that I was going to do after that, after Tommy's year in London. Live happily ever after, maybe. But it was okay, just the same. We had a year like every girl and boy should have, one of wretched, grinding poverty, but unlike a lot of traveling scholars, he actually did study, and he did get his master's degree. And then we came back to Amerika with a K instead of a C and were against the war and stuff, and Tommy taught at MIT and got his Ph.D. You had to give that boy credit. He looked like a dope-smokin' hippie; he talked like a refusenik draft-resister, and he really didn't have a single stinkin' capitalist-running-dog bone in his whole body. But he loved his economics and he worked his butt off, and whatever you thought about how he looked or how he talked, you had to admit he knew his stuff. The kid was good, clearly headed for stardom.

"So I dumped him, naturally," she said. "Couldn't have that now, could we, being married to a star? Absolutely not. I think I dumped him, anyway; it's possible he may've dumped me. Probably depends on who's telling the story. But that was all after a while, not right off.

First he got a job teaching at UMass." and something studious and academic began stirring around again, deep down inside my fevered brain."

She held her hands aloft as though to indicate she was having a vision.

"I perceive that I am getting on in years. By this time I am almost twenty-four, ancient, and I suppose I am beginning at long last to grow up. As the hot-shot young professor's, ah, demure young wife, I was able to get free tuition. Then I was able to talk the proper authorities first into accepting the credits I'd sort of left behind at Wisconsin, and also some I'd sort of picked up while I wasn't doing much of anything else besides sleeping with Tommy in England, kind of studying at the University of London. After that, talking very fast, into letting me switch my major to psychology."

"Wow," Merrion said, "I'm impressed. They always made me give them money."

She smiled. "You probably weren't demure," she said. "I was, I was very demure. And academics're suckers for that. As a teacher's wife I was entitled to the undergrad free tuition anyway, and when they let me transfer credits like that, they were being maybe more than just a little bit crafty. They wanted Tommy to stay at UMass. Didn't want him flying off to some other place, better-known for its economics. So I'm sure it was at the back of their minds to use me to tie him down a little more securely, get his wife involved with a UMass. program of her own.

"So they let me study psych for free, being as how by then I was more interested in that than I was in music. I got so I enjoyed it. I was having fun. So naturally since fun isn't supposed to last very long, it seemed to go fast. It was kind of surprising how fast; what with summer-school and all, and no horsing around, everything fell into place. In just over a year I had enough credits to graduate.

"I'd barely started the grad program for master's in psychiatric social work when Tommy's comet ignited in the heavens of economics and he got precisely what everyone'd been expecting him to get all along: an invitation to join the faculty at the University of Chicago. Muslims have always had Mecca; Tommy in those days had Chicago.

'"I don't think I want to come with you," I told him. "I think I found out where it was that I've always been going. It was here. I want to stay here. You go if you want. I think you should." "So do I," Tommy said, and he did.

"When he left, me and UMass. both, I think they felt a little guilty, too, somehow responsible. After all, they'd lured my young husband to Amherst and what'd he done but go off and leave me there all by myself.

Like it was partly their fault. I didn't discourage that. Whatever they wanted to think that helped me was perfectly all right with me.

I'd finally begun to come down to earth and realize I was never going to be the first-chair oboe in the Cleveland Orchestra and have a torrid affair with George Szell. He was getting a little old for me by then anyway, and since I didn't have a husband anymore I decided the first thing I'd better do was find a way to make a living. And that's why I stayed.

"You see what I mean?" Diane said. "I don't really belong here? This is just where I washed ashore? You and everybody else I've met and gotten to know well here all seem to have some kind of inner gyro that controls you, determines how you rotate. It may be a little out of kilter, so sometimes you spin off-center; quite a few of you're like that. But I've never seen you go completely out of whack. You may teeter and wobble around, but generally you regain control and keep on spinning. And it looks to me as though you can do this without having to think about what you're doing.

"I'm not like that. If something's important to me, I have to have a program, how I'm going to handle it so it doesn't handle me. You're important to me now; we're important to me, so I have to have a program on how I'm going to handle us."

"Why not just make it up as we go along?" Merrion said. "That's what we've been doing up 'til now, isn't it? Worked out okay up to this point, or so I'd say anyway."

"Because up 'til now it didn't involve sex," she said. "For you that apparently doesn't amount to a major change, but to me it does. I don't mean I'm a retroactive virgin here now. That's not what I'm trying to say. Sex is important to me and I've missed it since Walter died, and I have to tell you honestly that if you hadn't been around here the other night to do what you did so nicely; or if you'd made some excuse that made me think sex wasn't going to be a part of our nice friendship, pretty soon I would've had to start looking around for some other man who might be willing to devote some of his time and energy to keeping a refined lady comfortable.

"I've had the project in the back of my mind ever since a few days after Walter's funeral. Not that there was any emergency involved; I didn't have to restrain myself around the funeral director or anything like that. I just had it in my mind that sooner or later I'd have to start thinking about reaching an understanding with a discreet gentleman.

"And now that I've apparently done that, well, now I have to get everything all orderly and tidy, and settled in my mind.

Because I have to warn you, Amby, I've always been the kind of girl who's reasonably easy, but I tend to get attached to someone I'm having sex with. One-night stands're not my bag. So you have to be on your guard about that. I'm really asking quite a lot of you, I know. You have to provide me with sex and you have to be discreet and you have to be a gentleman about it. You may not want this job."

"Lemme think," Merrion said. "The gentleman-part I think I can handle.

I've had experience with that. The attachment part, too. I was attached to someone once, and I liked it, but that was before I found out I was lots more attached to her than she was to me. When I found out I didn't like it, but it didn't matter much by then because she'd done what Walter did, only a lot sooner. Inna meantime someone else got attached to me, and a very nice someone else she was, and still is, but I didn't get attached to her. She didn't like that a whole lot.

But in this case, if you're telling me it's mutual, as you seem to be, then that shouldn't be that much of a problem.

"The discretion I may have some trouble with. The women I've known've been single like me. What we did was our business. I haven't had a lot of call for that particular specialty."

"Well, you'll want to get to work on it, then," she said. "For the boys' sake, I mean. Rachel I'm not concerned about. Rachel, if I don't do something silly and get her all stirred up, will happily stay right where she is, down there in Washington; contentedly doing just what she does, "working far too many hours" in the office of counsel of the National Association of Broadcasters; "and spending far too little time with her husband and her kids. Not that Terry's liable to notice, since he's as bad as she is and works far too hard himself," in the legal office of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

"The boys're a different matter." They were both still at Mount Hermon then. Phil, nine when his father died, had taken it hard and was still recovering, very slowly. Diane, when she and Merrion had become lovers, was not confident that the boy, 'so much like his father," had yet completely regained his equilibrium, and would not do so until Christmas, 1990, when he came home during his freshman year at Connecticut Wesleyan and announced he had joined the Army, signing up for a four-year program offering training in electronics, and wasn't going back to college, 'probably ever."

"Walter made no secret of it, how he'd hated college," Diane, much relieved, told Merrion then. "Many times he told me how unhappy he'd been when he was away at school, and how wrong his grandfather'd been to've sent him, made him go. "All I ever wanted to do when I grew up and came home from Mount Hermon was stay home from Mount Hermon and go to work in the agency and learn how to run the business, and then spend the rest of my life doing that."

Her second son, Ben, four years younger, had been at Deerfield only a year when Walter died. He was a strange and solemn kid who seemed puzzled by his father's death, as though feeling he had never known his father well enough to miss him too much when he went away. He had already somehow begun to assemble what amounted to a new life for himself, using what Deerfield had given him to work with, spending all but his shortest vacations with a roommate whose family had a cattle ranch in British Columbia, putting so much emotional as well as geographical distance between himself and the house with the yellow door in Canterbury that he had in effect resigned from the family before his father's death.

"But that doesn't mean I think he needs to know that his mother's having sexual relations with the guy from the courthouse his old man used to have too much to drink with. I don't mind if he does know, if either one of them, Phil or Ben, starts to think about it, figures it out, and draws the obvious conclusion. As I'm sure in time they will they're not stupid kids, after all. But I want them to have the option: either of thinking about it, and figuring out that their mother's having sex again, or of not thinking about it, if that suits them, drawing no conclusion at all. So that's why you have to be discreet."

What they had done was work out an arrangement that looked to Merrion as though it might last him, at least, for as many years as he had left 'maybe thirty or so," he said one winter Saturday at Grey Hills when he'd had a game of racquetball with Heck Sanderson and then done ten laps in the indoor pool, 'if I keep this up," as of course he had not.

The substance of it was what Hilliard had been looking to find out when he poked around, and what Merrion would not disclose. They had promised to take care of each other.

"You certainly look like hell this morning," she said affectionately after he had parked in her driveway and come into her house through the back door without knocking.

"Thank you very much," he said, getting a mug from the cupboard and filling it from the coffee pot on the counter next to the sink, 'so nice of you to notice. I suppose I probably do. I've fucking well come by it honest, up 'til all hours with a pack of criminals. What the hell else can you expect?" He drank some of the coffee. "Actually, though, I feel pretty good. And you look perfectly great."

The cat rubbed against her shins and she nudged it away with her foot, hard. "Oh no, you don't, you no-good bastard," she said. "Think you're getting back in my good graces that easy, you miserable son of a bitch."

"Peter been a bad boy?" Merrion said. In order to afflict the man he called his sometimes job-so-solemnly-religious, always-no-help uncle,"

Walter had named the cat Simon and called him Peter.

"Peter shat in the bathtub again last night," she said. "Peter's landlady damned near stepped in Peter's shit barefoot this morning when she went to take her shower, which would've made her good and mad at Peter if she had. Peter would've been lucky if he hadn't ended up in the pound. Not that Peter's landlady enjoyed having to wash the crap down the drain and then scrub the goddamned tub before she could wash her body."

"I told you when you did it," Merrion said. "I warned you when you had him fixed, you and Walter both: "You have that poor cat's nuts cut off, he's not gonna like it. He'll never forgive you, and he'll find some way to get even." And that's what he's been doin', ever since what is it? Fourteen years now? Gettin' even with you. Just like I would've and just like Walter would've, too, if you'd done it to either one of us."

"Finish your coffee," Diane said, picking up the cat and heading for the door. "Let me put this offender out and you can tell me all the way to the two fat sos all about the human desperadoes."