A change of gravity

FIVE

Three-eighths of a mile back from Route 9, facing southwest at the foot of Mount Wolf in Cumberland, the pale grey three-story clubhouse at Grey Hills that Saturday morning stood impeccably white-shuttered in green August shade, the lofty old maples and oaks flanking the drive bowing and rustling in a variable northwest breeze. Jesse Grey had started the sixteen-month process of building it in 1896 as the thirty-six room manor house and centerpiece of his 332-acre estate, suitable for the new life as a country gentleman he had in mind to crown his success in the paper-milling business on the Connecticut River.

"Success that came right out of the hides of the poor devils working for him. Drove his people unmercifully, full double-shifts, sixteen hours a day in the mill, five and a half days a week. For twenty or thirty cents a day," Larry Lane said, recalling Grey with dutiful second-hand malice. "They tended to die young one of 'em was an uncle of mine, Uncle Eddie; was dead before I was born. Before they got to be twenty-five. Bastards like Jesse just worked them to death. What did they care? When the morning came someone didn't show up, or did but collapsed on the job, Jesse had 'em waiting in line to replace him.

"No one around here at the time really knew the whole extent of what Grey'd had done up there, woods he'd had cut down and the pasture he'd had turned into lawns," Lane said. "He brought in all his own foremen from outside. He hired local labor to improve Wolf River and the South Brook for trout fishing, make them run faster with deeper pools; clear the brush and put up the fences, white board like you see on TV, the horse farms in Kentucky on Derby Day; lay out the bridle paths and build the tennis courts and pool. The house and barns and stable; the quarter-mile exercise track.

But all anyone really knew enough to speak of was the part of the job that he did; that the bathrooms were all Italian marble; the size of the big crystal chandeliers. They knew it was grand and elegant, sure, but just how grand and how swell didn't come out 'til years later.

"Then when it did almost no one was interested. One of those WPA writers FDR put to work in the Depression went back and dug up the history of the old place, to go with some pictures they had taken of it for a book about the valley. They put copies in all the libraries around here. For all the good that did; nobody read the damned thing.

Well, I did, but you never could go by what I did. Nobody else ever read it.

"What this WPA guy did was track down the ledgers with the accounts of the money Grey'd sunk into that place. It came to about nine hundred thousand dollars and this was at the turn of the century. Be eight or ten million today."

Thirty-five years later, two years into the Depression, Grey's heirs had found themselves too short of money to maintain the estate, and had been forced to put it up for sale. Lane had seen it as it was then.

"Still used to go and fish there. The fact the place was all neglected didn't mean the trout'd all packed up and gone away, or that Grey and his fine fancy friend's caught all of them before they faded away themselves. What'd always been there was still there; you could catch a nice fat two-or three-pound rainbow, or a good-sized brown down by the Ox Bow. The streams were still okay; just the place'd gone to hell."

Lane had not been exaggerating. The photographs that the auctioneer had commissioned in the mid-Thirties for use in the brochure to advertise the property to potential bidders far away without success, as it turned out were on display in the card-room of the Grey Hills clubhouse. The sepia-toned eight-by-ten glossies showed the rolling lawns overgrown; the gardens gone to seed. The two-by-fours that had tautly. framed the block-U-shaped chicken-wire enclosures at the ends of the two clay tennis courts had fallen down. Six deep slatted wooden lawn-chairs with arms broad enough to serve as trays stood bleached and rotten by the courts, four abandoned at odd angles along the sidelines of one, the others together near the westerly baseline of the second.

Merrion imagined their occupants in better days rising slowly with tennis sweaters draped over their shoulders, the men in long white flannel pants, the women in long white tennis dresses going away from the chairs and up across the lawn toward the great house, the windows lighted golden in the blue twilight of some early autumn Sunday evening, '28, or '29, the future growing dark and closing in around them, the carefree people innocent, unaware it was one of the last weekend gatherings they would have together there, a rich contented family, with wealthy handsome friends.

In the old photographs weeds had reclaimed the playing surfaces. The buildings still barely standing then were dilapidated, all their window-glass long since shot out, needing much more than paint. The mews off behind the northeast corner of the house, where the pro shop now stood, had burned in lightning-started fires in the spring of 1930.

They had never been rebuilt; in the pictures two charred vertical beams stood in the rubble. Most of the tiles a watercolor done by some Grey family guest showed them to have been azure had fallen into the vast swimming pool, exposing the white mastic that had dried on the cement underneath. The beams and the shingled roof of the four-room cabana and verandah lay collapsed on the edge of the apron on the southerly side. The house had tilted off at a slight angle to the east, its three massive chimneys leaning toward the center of its sagging rooftree, by then almost buckled. The barn, since demolished, in the photograph retained the double doors, large and small, up and down, each of them securely latched when Herbert Hoover was still in the White House, claiming to see better days just ahead for the nation. But the auctioneer's photographer had set up his view camera to take the picture from dead center at the front; Mount Wolf was clearly visible behind it through the gaps in its siding.

"The wonder was that all of it hadn't been torched, right to the ground," Lane said. "Only reason it wasn't was because by the time Grey's heirs sold it, they were just as down-and-out as everybody else.

Not worth envying and hating any more. Besides, hardly anyone still alive by then ever knew them. Few oldtimers who were still around who hated Jesse couldn't do much to hurt him; he was long and safely dead. Got himself thrown by a horse, I recall, before FDR came in. You could call Jesse lots of names, but you couldn't fault his timing, came to knowing when to clear out.

"Anyway," Larry Lane said, 'at that point taking pictures of it was a total waste of time, no matter if it was the WPA was throwing away taxpayers' money to make a book no one'd read or the auction house trying to see if they could scare up a buyer someplace in the world.

They couldn't. The whole shebang was worthless, likely to stay that way. We look back now at the Depression and we nod to each other and say how bad it must've been then; took a world-war-economy boom to get us out of it, ten, eleven years of hopelessness and then five, six more of being afraid no matter what the president said. But from here we can see that it come to an end. From there, the point of view of people living through it, out of work, no money to buy food, it looked different, like it'd never end.

"That's why Jesse Grey's estate was worthless; not because it wasn't still beautiful property but because no one had any money to buy it. So no matter what it'd cost to build it and equip it, it was worth nothing. And hopeless because there's no hope in this goddamned world for any one or any thing that isn't worth some kind of money.

"So, since it looked hopeless, just as you would've expected, if you'd thought about it at all, the Catholic fucking Church bought it. For chump change, of course, its usual price. What it generally pays if it doesn't get what it wants as a gift, absolutely for free. A hundred-ten-thousand dollars, all told, dirt-cheap even back then. Back taxes, of course, and about sixty grand in bank notes some overconfident Grey or other'd borrowed from some unusually stupid banker when the family fortune'd started to melt away meeting margin calls, month or so after the Crash. One cockeyed optimist going deeper into debt with another one, still convinced the rich kid's playground could be saved.

"A hundred-and-ten-thousand dollars. For three-hundred-and-thirty-two acres of prime land. Three-hundred-and-some bucks an acre. Bad news for the Grey family, of course, already up to its hips in bad news, but bad news too for the town of Cumberland, which didn't need any more either. That was the single most valuable parcel of property in the whole town, and just like that, it was off the assessment rolls, no longer a taxable asset. Even if and when the economy came back, as of course it did, that property wasn't going to be any use to anyone unless they had enough bucks not just to buy it but then spend rebuilding it. No one could afford to let an investment that big sit idle unless you count the Catholic Church.

"God bless the Roman Catholic Church," Larry Lane many times said, always seeming to marvel, laughing and shaking his head, as though he really had been at once utterly baffled and completely amused. "As surely He must've, a great many times, to explain what it's gotten away with. Year after year; decade after decade; the century after the centuries before, the Catholic Church marches on.

"The bishop in the Thirties here McLaughlin was his name, that much I am sure of; Francis McLaughlin, I think apparently shared the predominant view of the men who run his church that a bishop can't have too much land. Or too many buildings, as far as that goes, even if they're all fallin' down. So when Jesse's remaining heirs or their lawyers, I dunno, whoever all those people were down in Phil-la-dci-phy-ay when they put his great estate up for sale here, the only bidder in sight was the diocese of Springfield.

One-hundred-and-ten-thousand American dollars. I've got no idea how or where his sacredness came up with the money. He never confided in me.

Or what on earth he planned to do with the ramshackle place. Most people thought he didn't, either. Just get it first, and then, bye and bye, think about what you're gonna do with it. You've got plenty of time. "Forever's a very long time'; that's the way the people think in Holy Mother Church. They've got the keys to forever."

In 1948 eighteen wealthy men of the Pioneer Valley formed a real estate trust and negotiated the purchase of the property from the diocese. The deed recited that price for the transfer of the property to the Grey Hills Association, a non-profit organization newly-established by documents drawn up by one of their leaders, Warren Corey, of Butler amp;. Corey, was 'one dollar and other valuable consideration, receipt of which is hereby acknowledged." The actual price was not disclosed. "Three-hundred-odd-thousand was the price you heard quoted," Lane said, 'just under a thousand an acre. But no one outside the deal knew."

The architects the association hired to plan and oversee the beginnings of the four-year transformation shrewdly laid out the property so that the par 71, 7,241-yard championship golf course, designed by Robert Trent Jones, formed a natural tiara for the mansion. The country club opened in 1952, 'reinventing serenity in the beautiful valley of the Connecticut River," Life said the following year in an October feature issue entitled "Life Goes to New England in the Fall."

The architects and engineers curved the main entrance drive slightly, to preserve as many as possible of the tall oaks and broad maples forming a canopy over it, bordering the approach with low stone walls broken here and there for footpaths. Visitors approached the clubhouse among the undulating fairways and deceptively-beckoning greens of the most spectacular seven of the eighteen showcase holes, crossing the slightly arched stone bridge over South Brook into the circular drive at the main entrance hedged all around with rose, rhododendron, and lilac bushes.

A hexagonal brass lantern six feet long and two feet wide hung on a black chain under the porte cochere; except during high winds or snow-storms, an assistant steward brought a twelve-foot wooden stepladder from the equipment shack each Friday morning, set it up in front of the dark red front door and polished the lantern. Eight years away from celebration of its 50th anniversary season, what one columnist for Golf had called 'the crown jewel links of western New England' to the considerable displeasure of notable members of several other equally exclusive clubs between Worcester and Albany Grey Hills that August Saturday made the gritty vision of Janet LeClerc vanish from Merrion's mind like a dragon imagined in a cloud changing shape in the wind. He thought that if working Saturday morning meant you could drive your Eldorado down Valley Drive into Grey Hills and spend the rest of the day playing eighteen holes of golf and having lunch with your friend Danny Hilliard, only a fool would sleep late.

The brilliant white fine sand filling the traps was renewed every spring, trucked in from Eastham on the elbow of Cape Cod.

Forty-two-hundred-dollar annual fees, rumored soon to be increased, six hundred dollars more, from three hundred and twenty-five members, covered that. In the summer the grass remained soft, emerald-jersey green, pampered early mornings and evenings with water from the cold streams Grey's laborers had improved, and whenever Merrion went there, he remembered what Dan Hilliard had said back in 1992 as they drank Dom Perignon to celebrate their twenty years of membership: "It doesn't matter who you are, where you've been or what you've done, or how many times you've been here: Every time that you come back, drive down Valley Drive in the shade of those venerable trees; see the sunlight making the dew silver in the morning; feel the cool breeze slipping down from the hills in the summer; or smell the maple burning in the fireplace in the fall, that same sweet lovely hush still welcomes you.

You can almost hear it whispering: "Peace now, the struggle's interrupted. You've come; you're here; everything's all right again."

"I know you're always telling me I just don't understand what being members at Grey Hills means to you and Dan," Diane said the next morning, to welling her hair as she emerged from her shower, 'but if that champagne toast he made last night wasn't the corniest thing I ever heard in my life, it's sure got to be well-up-there in the running."

"It's simple," Merrion said, baring his teeth for inspection in the mirror, "Grey Hills is the only thing we've ever gotten, from doing what we've done all our lives, that was strictly for us, our reward.

From the very beginning, everything that Danny's ever done in public life; everything that I've done, first when I was helping him run for office and then at the courthouse, has always been primarily for someone else's good. At least one somebody else; in Danny's case, down in the House, for all the people in his district, what he's thought would be best for them, his constituents. In my case, what would be the best thing to do in a given case that would make Cumberland or Hampton Falls or Hampton Pond or Canterbury a better place to live, either by helping to make sure that someone who's done something bad in one of the towns, violated social order, gets punished for it so that he or she maybe wont do it again and also so that someone else who sees how they got punished for doing it wont do that same thing himself."

"Yes," she said, drying under her breasts, 'and if I'm not mistaken, you're both fairly well paid for your valuable services, and also get health-care and retirement plans."

"Indeed we do," Merrion said. "We were never rich men. We'd've been awful fools to've done it for nothing." He turned away from the mirror. She stepped away from the tub enclosure to make way for him, bending at the same time to dry her legs, and he patted her on the left buttock. "Nice ass," he said, 'very nice ass."

"Animal," she said, straightening up and out of his reach, 'sanctimonious do-gooder, claiming virtue for making a living."

"Anyone else in my job or Danny's would've gotten the same money we do," he said, one foot in the tub. "But they might not've filled them like we have. That's where the virtue is: it's in how we've done those jobs. We really do think of them as public trusts. We really do work to make sure we deserve that trust. I know it sounds like campaign bullshit, but it's the truth."

He took his foot out of the tub and stood contemplating her in her nakedness, glad explaining and pretending he was trying to convince her was giving him the excuse. "Grey Hills is the indulgence we've permitted ourselves to get from doing that work. It's the only thing we've ever gotten that we said from the beginning we wanted purely for us. Knowing of course that wed never really get it; as Danny said last night: "No question about it it was totally presumptuous of us to even think it, think some day we might get in."

This's one of the finest golf clubs in the world. For us to imagine wed ever become members was silly. It was like some high-school second baseman making his league all-star team and thinking now he's got it wired, he is definitely on his way to the major leagues and a Hall of Fame career ending up in Cooperstown: a kid's golden dream and nothing more.

"And then son of a gun, we got in.

"In a way we still can't believe that we did it. When we were young men it looked way out of reach. We couldn't afford it, and not only that, if wed had the money and tried to get in, they wouldn't've let us we weren't well-bred enough for that bunch. So it was always something beyond our wildest dreams. And then all of a sudden, the planets align and we're in. There's only one possible explanation for this: it's what we got for being good men."

He was tumescent and stepped back from the shower, starting toward her.

She backed away holding the towel out in her left hand at arm's length and grabbing the other end with her right as though intending to snap him with it. She said smiling: "No, no, Simba, not playtime now; time to wash. Coffee first. Back off and get yourself into that shower.

Tell yourself what a grand public servant you are while you're getting yourself clean. I've had enough of your pious guff."

"The thing men always have to remember about women," he said as though talking to himself, stepping into the shower, 'is the ones who're sexy lack soul."

On a gray Saturday in Holyoke in the early spring of 1966, Dan Hilhard in his High Street office had invited Merrion to tell him what he wanted, nodding approvingly as he listened. "Uh-huh," Hilliard'd said, 'that would make a lot of sense, wouldn't it. Grab that clerkship for you now, while nobody's really mad at us. Oughta go through like grease through a goose. And it would too, if it weren't for just one thing, just one minor problem, standing between you and that job. Larry Lane. He has to clear it through Chassy, but he's the guy who appoints."

"I don't even know him," Merrion'd said. "I don't even know who he is."

"I know that," Hilliard'd said, "I realize that. That's a big part of this minor problem."