A change of gravity

NINE

Hilliard's seven-year-old dark-green Mercedes Benz 300D sedan was not in the lot east of the clubhouse when Merrion parked his Eldorado coupe metallic maroon; white leather-grained-vinyl tiara roof, gold nameplates and badges, and narrow-striped whitewall tires. He was nowhere to be seen around the locker room or the putting-practice green. Running true to form: late.

For him it was like having an irregular pulse: He recognized it as abnormal but lived comfortably with it, so it was all right. Aware that his attitude angered people who had business with other people as well as with him, he considered their reactions excessive and did not become upset. "When I'm late I know sometimes people get pissed off," he said to Rev Peter Healy, a friendly priest and Grey Hills member, irritated by his tardy arrival at a communion breakfast. "I cram a lot into my life, much as I possibly can. Things sometimes take longer than I expect. Therefore I become late getting to the next thing.

Welcome to reality. I can't do much about it, unless I'm ready to start saying No a lot. In this case that would've meant I couldn't come to this affair. You would've been mad at me. Thus proving that in politics saying No to people more'n you have to isn't a wise practice; therefore I'm not ready. So what you have to do, dealing with me, is master delayed gratification. You may find that also solves that problem you've been having with premature ejaculation."

"You could call, though, once in a while," Mercy would tell him. "I don't like it, but I knew you had this problem and married you anyway.

I have to live with it. Other people don't think they do. They think the least you could do is call up. Let someone know you're going to be late. You're inconsiderate. All that matters is when you're ready to get around to doing something; never when somebody else is.

"I know," she'd say, "I know I know I know. I met Danny when he came to a freshman mixer my first year at Emmanuel. The next week we went out. A month later we were going steady. I haven't seen the beginning of a movie since I was eighteen years old. The only times I've seen the priest come out onto the altar've been the times I went to Mass by myself. When I go with Danny I'm lucky to hear the epistle; he thinks if you hear the gospel, you've been. I pretended I liked baseball when he was courting me. I didn't, but it's easy when the ballgames you see start in the fourth inning. You'd like me to break him of this habit?

Where do you live Fantasy Island?"

Legislative colleagues criticized him as difficult to work with, saying his habitual tardiness had a domino effect on their schedules, making others angry at them. Friendly TV reporters allocating regional and statewide air-time became unfriendly as he failed repeatedly to show up for interviews on time. Commentators who differed with him ideologically found sinister implications, delivering commentaries suggesting that his chronic lateness betrayed deep-seated disdain for ordinary people, scorn he expressed more subtly and harm fully in the liberal and elitist legislation he proposed and sponsored. One Globe columnist who was black printed his deduction that Hilliard's failure to show up for an interview was proof of racism, prompting a colleague who was white to respond the next day: "On the contrary, it proves his deep commitment to equal rights. Dan Hilliard runs his life like a no-appointments barber-shop; rich or poor, or black or white, everybody waits."

In the fall of 1972 Hilliard arrived an hour and twenty minutes late for a George McGovern fund-raising dinner at the Park Plaza. "No one in Boston last night probably would've minded much that the Democratic majority leader in the Massachusetts House decided to dine fashionably late," Tom Brokaw said on NBC, smiling broadly, 'if Mister Hilliard hadn't been the person scheduled on the program to introduce the presidential candidate." Brokaw's mischievous glee designating "Hilliard's gaffe' as 'one of many low-lights' in the chaotic state of McGovern's presidential campaign, 'reeling across the country from fiasco to debacle' suggested to Merrion and others familiar with Hilliard's urges that the anchorman knew very well what had deflected Dan from the performance of his duty.

Fiercely chastising Hilliard by phone, as by then he had done many times face to face, Merrion said: "Brokaw thinks you were off getting hid, for Christ sake. As I also think, and I'm not the only one, either. I think we're gonna have to get you operated on. Get you gelded like they have to do to horny race horses, get their minds off their cocks and make 'em behave, keep their minds on their business.

You're makin' yourself into a laughing stock. Wreckin' your career with your dick. Pissin' yourself. I'm your friend and I'm fuckin' ashamed of you."

Hilliard sounded miserably contrite. "Mercy's mad at me, too," he said.

"She oughta be," Merrion said. "Mercy's an intelligent woman. I'd be surprised if she wasn't. You think she believes you spend four nights a week in your Boston apartment watchin' TV and tattin' doilies? If she does, it's because she wont face the truth. And if that's it, it wont be for much longer you're makin' it too hard for her. You're embarrassin' your friends, Dan, but you're making her life Hell on earth. Everyone laughin' at you. Brokaw, for Christ sake on national TV; he probably knows her name, for Christ sake, who the broad is you're fooling around with. And your office didn't help any either, some beauty in there tellin' the Globe "something suddenly came up."

And if you try to tell me the Globe guy made it up, I'll tell you he should get an award. Next thing'll be Johnny Carson tellin' jokes about you inna monologue."

Hilliard demurred, very feebly, saying Brokaw wouldn't have any way to find out the name of the woman "I've been seeing."

"Oh put a lid on it," Merrion said, 'give me a load of that shit. What you're doing isn't "seeing." It's "fucking," "getting' blow-jobs."

Inna second place, everyone knows anything knows it's Stacy, and everyone who doesn't's going to pretty soon. Meat that fresh don't keep."

Stacy Hawkes was a twenty-nine-year-old woman who preferred to work chiefly in the newsroom as a producer for the CBS Boston affiliate; a former Miss Connecticut during her junior year majoring in history at Yale, she had started out in the business as on-air talent. She said she did her occasional award-winning special reports on state politics to keep her teeth sharp and 'make sure I can still do it."

Political reporters at competing Boston stations bitterly alleged she gained inside information by means that the males among them lacked.

The females said they would not work the way she did.

Late for golf with Merrion that August Saturday, nearly a quarter-century later, Hilliard had logged more than ten years in what he called his 'public-educator suit' since his retirement in 1984 from what he described as 'the open and gross practice of politics." Hasn't changed him a bit.

Merrion had not bothered checking the sign-up sheet on the wall of the pro shack to see whether they were still playing by themselves at 11:30 or if Dan, without telling him, had paired them with another twosome scheduled to start later. He sat contentedly in one of the puffy-cushioned light blue PVC-pipe armchairs in the dappled shade on the blue-grey flagstone terrace overlooking the first tee, at indolent peace with the summer-Saturday universe around him and all but one of the people within his field of vision in it. A mug of creamed hazlenut coffee cooled on the round white PVC table in front of him.

Over it he watched Julian Sanderson, Ralph Lauren golf ensemble artfully disheveled, set skillfully to work on the three new members.

Not that he lacked talent; what he would be doing, lightly adjusting grips and forearms; tucking left elbows in; widening and narrowing; opening and closing stances, turning torsos ever so slightly was overloading their minds, so that before they hit a ball that morning they would be focused upon doing their very best to hit it as he said.

During such engagements Julian talked only about golf and how to hit golf shots, the only subject except perhaps, sex — he was really competent to talk about at all. It was therefore likely that his clients might play better golf that Saturday than they had on recent outings that had caused them to hire Julian to teach what Dan Hilliard was fond of reminding himself and everyone within earshot when he put a tee-shot into the rough 'isn't about how to build a fucking rocket-ship to go to fucking Mars, just how to hit a fucking golf ball that sits perfectly still and says "Hit me."

This would be a development so pleasant they would overlook its temporary nature and not only give Julian all the credit but kick in their respective shares of the one-hundred-fifty-dollar purse fee he would be charging for playing a round with them. Merrion could see the basic fairness of this exchange, but he did not approve of it.

He did not like Julian. He believed that was not because Julian was good-looking. Merrion conceded the utility of good looks. Hilliard said that people often underestimated him because 'the choir-boy curls," now white but still thick, 'and the cherub's face make 'em doubt you'd even think of pulling a fast one on them. So you can do it now and then, when you think you've got a good reason, and get away with it."

Merrion regarded Julian as a nuisance. He thought that if Julian were to disappear suddenly it would be a good thing. Forty-two or so, a tanned and trim six-footer chiseled blond and handsome, with an athlete's languid ease of movement, Julian had six or seven years before accepted reality he'd resisted a long time: Contrary to his expectations, after much practice and success in prep school and college competitions he had turned out to be a considerably-better-than-average golfer.

Good enough to outclass all the other players in their age-group at their own clubs, such golfers can be worthy opponents in regional and state-wide pro-am tournaments. All they have to do is set their minds to it; short-change their responsibilities at work; slough their family obligations; get plenty of rest; go easy on the cocktails and watch what they eat behave, in other words, as Dan Hilliard said, though only for a while, like people who get it into their heads to become candidates for major statewide office or national recognition and then follow that regimen for two months every year. To be that good can be a dismal fate.

"Horseshoes and hand-grenades're the only sports where close is good enough," Hilliard said, when he missed short putts. On their very best days they are not quite good enough to compete successfully on the Professional Golf Association circuit. For nearly eight years Julian had time after time come not-quite-close-enough to making second-round cuts at second-rate pro tournaments up and down the east coast. It depressed him to describe his travels to naive visiting players who assumed they must have seen this man, said to have been a touring pro, in the company of Greg Norman, Tom Kite and Chi-Chi Rodriguez hitting long drives, lofting beautiful wedge shots and sinking long putts across the screens of their game-room projection TVs. "Oh, well, like the Nike Tour, out of Sawgrass?" Merrion had heard him say, elaborately nonchalant.

Having heard of the shoe manufacturer but not the golf circuit they'd look blank, saying, "Gee, must've missed that one." Their ignorance irked and embarrassed him; it did not surprise him.

Explaining, he would omit the fact that the Nike was a southern mini-tour, seldom televised beyond the reception area of the local cable-TV outlet with its headquarters office in the shopping mall on Route 1, or viewed anywhere except in the bar of the host country club.

He also passed over the fact that 1993 had been his last year of touring, and left out the $100 entry fee he'd had to pay each of the fourteen Monday mornings that he'd tried to qualify for one of those 54-hole events. He passed over the additional $150 he paid to compete in the nine in which he'd made the cut, having managed to finish among the top eight players during one of those gut-checking Mondays. He did not mention what it had cost him meaning: his father, Haskell; his friends knew him as Heck to live downright crummy during his touring days, paying eighty-five or ninety bucks a night to scuff along in roach-infested motels at the height of the tourist season, the alternative being to bunk unwashed in his car. He sloughed all the dreariness with a sigh and admitted he hadn't really done 'all that well, my last year only won about seven thousand or so," sixty-eight-fifty, actually, if what Merrion had heard from Heck was the truth in the fifteen seedy weeks he'd spent in Florida between New Year's and the end of March, the second-best season he'd had.

"Put it this way," Julian would say, dolloping his rue with the lop-sided smile of charming chagrin that attracted females, "I didn't play enough weekends." The third and fourth rounds Saturdays and Sundays followed the second reduction of the fields after the second rounds played Fridays. Golfers ranked below the top 64, 96 or 128 were excluded. Those making the cut were paired up to compete for the prizes on Sunday.

When Julian was very young and still in school he'd been startled to discover, accidentally, the wonderfully seductive effect self-deprecation had on women. Gradually he'd come to understand that it would nearly always work, forever luring a gratifyingly regular number of solicitous women to tend gently to his needs. "Lost boys," he confided to male friends and occasionally to tolerant female friends as well, usually when he'd had too much to drink, 'get mucho ass." Now, Merrion had observed, the angels ministering to Julian were of a certain age, but they still showed the old eagerness, flaring their nostrils and prancing around on the grass, their appetites and skills perhaps now even sharpened by practice, slightly improved by nostalgia.

Merrion recognized what he felt as envy, another reason for resenting Julian. In a few years, when the women in their early forties had finished with Julian, they'd be about the right age for him. But by then he'd have become a little too old to interest them in the tinkling drinks, light conversations and ninety-minute dinners understood by both participants as preliminary to vigorous and protracted sexual intercourse. But then again, perhaps, on a cold winter's night, wind blowing past the window… JFK? Sure, I knew him a little. One night down in West Virginia, back in Sixty, driving poor Humphrey nuts and..:

"Sklaffed too many off the tees in sudden-death," Julian said in the bar now, in the evenings to the visitors buying drinks, explaining his withdrawal from the tour. The kid was good in the clinches, no matter how he'd been out on the courses. And he looked as though he'd found a way to make up nicely for that deficit; for a player unsuccessfully seeking small jackpots the best player late on a mini-tour late Sunday afternoon during Julian's years had usually pocketed about twenty thousand dollars.

But he had an impressive collection of multi-dialed watches, and heavy gold chains for all occasions.

"Birthday presents, he tells me," Heck Sanderson said over beers one hot still late afternoon in the dark green shade. Merrion found that unconvincing but kept quiet, seeing Heck, though disapproving, believed it. "Lots of people like him, I guess. Women-type people. Like to give him things. Don't like to live with him long, though, seem interested in having babies with him." Julian was an only child. Heck had gone beyond the age at which his contemporaries had reported births of grandchildren.

Julian had been married and divorced once during the transition from his twenties to his thirties, but while he had had two or three steady ladies since then, the last had left him before George Bush lost in '92. Now he lived alone in a two-bedroom condo Heck had bought for him in a spartan half-shingled half-timbered white stucco housing complex on Route 2 west of Amherst. Most of the other tenants were young faculty from UMass. and Amherst College. Returning late at night in his monster-tired 4X4 Ford Bronco, he often had to clear his parking space of neon-pink and green plastic Big Wheels and small bicycles with training wheels. When cold weather closed the Grey Hills course for the winter, he commuted north six afternoons a week in the overcast darkness to tend bar at the Molly Stark Tavern, a rich skiers' hangout in southern Vermont. The previous May when he returned to Grey Hills to resume his summer career, he seemed to have what Merrion thought was a great deal of money for a barkeep, even a good one, generously tipped, but at least the job got him off Heck's list of dependents;

Merrion kept his mouth shut.

Julian had played well enough and worked hard enough in the PGA Apprentice Program during the mid-through-late-Seventies to earn the card that qualified him to enter pro tournaments for the coming year, when he was twenty-four. He was coming off a record of having finished among the top ten in nineteen New England and Canadian pro-ams.

According to Heck, Julian partially financed his first year on the road with $6,000 won from men whose professional success had made them overconfident. Mistakenly believing they'd become good golfers, too, they thought because Julian was a transient and they were scratch players on familiar home turf, they were each fifty or a hundred bucks a round better than he was. Because Julian was careful not to beat them too badly, many tried several times to disprove what was plainly so. Heck cheerfully provided the other $19,000.

From the outset Heck had agreed to provide $15,000. The additional $4,000 or so had gone to cover unexpected expenses: among them four new tires for Julian's Bronco, several disappointing pot-limit poker hands he'd drawn sitting in on a game down in Augusta, Georgia, the week before the Masters, and a flirtation with cocaine that for a few years scared the hell out of him — explaining his need for more money to Heck, he camouflaged it as a costly lesson learned in a high-stakes eight-ball showdown he'd lost in a billiard room in Baton Rouge. Heck guilelessly repeated that story to his friends.

Merrion had seen Julian playing poker and bridge at Grey Hills with some of the better-off but denser members. He had no trouble believing Julian had gotten hoovered in Augusta. Never having known Julian to wear out the felt practicing combinations in the hush of the mahogany billiard room at Grey Hills, Merrion disbelieved Heck's second-hand story of the embarrassment in Louisiana, but he didn't scoff.

When Steve Brody's kid, Mark, claimed to've seen Julian once or twice doing business with the dealer in Holyoke who had supplied Mark for about a year, until the night State Police dropped in on a buy, Merrion was not wholly convinced by Mark's story. He had no trouble believing Julian used coke, but doubted he'd use a local supplier and if he had, it was probably Steve's rotten kid. Merrion believed Mark was setting the stage to retail Julian to the cops unless his father's clout with Merrion, earned by faithfully looking out for Larry Lane, was enough to save his ass from hard time. That made Merrion apprehensive that the time'd finally come when he'd have to say something to Heck, no matter how much it hurt him. After Mark's diversion into rehab, he braced the kid for the truth about Julian. Mark rubbed his red eyes, snuffled his corroded nose and said Heck's kid had been clean for a year. Merrion hadn't told Heck.

Heck Sanderson hadn't needed that. He owned the Mohawk Printing Company on Route 2, a couple miles east of Greenfield. He claimed it was grossing $6.3 million a year, nearly double the amount it had been making in 1968 when his father left it to him, when Heck was thirty' Seven But for an unadventurous young man from a settled, comfortable family, prepared at Deerfield for Syracuse, a family tradition; excused by a heart murmur from military service; married to a childhood sweetheart from the family's Unitarian congregation in the town where he'd grown up, Heck had taken his share of punches.

His father, Haskell senior, had been a man of indisputably upright character, moral and honest to a fault. The fault was that he was a domineering, overbearing, parsimonious, 'general-purpose son of a bitch." Heck had had to subordinate his own mind and spirit all the years he'd had to work for Haskell, grimly deferring to decisions that prevented the business from growing. When Haskell died of a stealthy brain tumor undetected until three weeks before he died 'he got a headache so all-fired bad he was actually forced to spend the time and the money to go see a doctor' Heck had managed the ceremonies of committal with spare, bleak, formal dignity, and that was all.

Having come into the life that his brains and hard work had earned for him, enjoying a few reasonable luxuries like membership in Grey Hills and a ski lodge in Vermont 'if the old bastard wasn't dead, what I've spent would've killed him' Heck wife, Lisa, died at the age of forty-one.

She was felled by a cerebral aneurysm while standing in her back yard one sunny April morning, feeling very good indeed, a dark blue headband on her dirty-blonde hair, slim in her starched pale-blue man-tailored shirt, stone-washed blue jeans and white sneakers, her feet apart and her arms folded under her breasts, smiling in her certainty that she fairly sparkled.

When it hit she was talking animatedly with a handsome young nurseryman named Nick Hardigrew. He had blue eyes and wavy black hair, white teeth and the well-muscled body of a lifelong athlete, former lifeguard and outdoor worker. He had driven up from Suffield, Connecticut at her invitation to look at the property and prepare a bid on re-landscaping it, planting dogwood, cherry, silver birch and red maple trees. A certified arborist, he had earned his bachelor's degree in arboriculture at the University of Massachusetts in his mid-twenties after two years in the infantry. He had enlisted out of high school planning on a military career, but after washing out of airborne school at Fort Benning, had taken an honorable discharge. He had learned cardiopulmonary resuscitation so that he could support his family by moonlighting as an EMT while building his business.

When Lisa Sanderson collapsed he kept his head and used all of his skills on her, but nothing worked. When the Northampton Rescue Unit arrived he told the driver: "That oxygen's not going to work. There was nothing I could do, that anyone could've done. She was dead before she hit the ground."

She had died happy. When the stroke slammed her on her back, brain-dead, she'd been having considerable but very pleasant difficulty keeping her mind on trees and bushes. Having met him, she'd become convinced that her friend Nina Ealing from Longmeadow, another stylish lady on the board of trustees of the Springfield Symphony, was definitely having an affair with this young man. She had begun to suspect it when Nina blushed and became flustered, fluttering her hands as she gushed her recommendation of Hardigrew's work. And she'd become sure that he was now coming on to her, which she found charming and exciting. She had been consequently quite distracted by a fantasy in which she'd already given him the landscaping job in order to have sex with him on the green-and-white chaise lounge in the sunporch on some hot afternoon when he was sweaty and had removed his faded black tee-shirt and used it to mop his hairy chest, she having lightly and casually invited him inside with an offer of beer. She had also definitely resolved simultaneously, it seemed, and perhaps more realistically, but ruling nothing out — to ask Nina wickedly over a drink after the next board meeting whether Hardigrew's bedding skills were limited to gardening. Then her happy world and her fine girlish plans and all her laughing dreams disappeared into the last darkness.

Devastated, Heck nonetheless seemed within a year or so to have recovered his equilibrium. The following winter, 1973-74, he'd remarried quite suddenly, it'd seemed to his friends if not to his only child, then about twenty. Julian hadn't been noticeably affected by his mother's death. "Hardly seemed to notice it," Hilliard'd said to Merrion when Heck was not around. "Not that it didn't inconvenience him; I heard him tell someone that the reason he didn't play in the Berkshire member-guest was the first round was the day of her funeral.

But nothing serious."

At first the new marriage seemed happy. The second wife was young enough but not too young, and that was good, such balances being important when a new woman moves into a small and settled community as the spouse of a prominent member. Not that anyone at the club was ever really sure of her exact age; she looked to be in her late thirties, a copper-haired and very pretty divorcee he'd met skiing, up at Killington. Some thought it ominous that while her name was Alicia, Heck called her "Lisha' in their hearing, too close to his first wife's name to make them feel right about it "Lisa Two," they called her, behind her back; suggesting Heck'd seized upon her mindlessly, as a replica.

In retrospect there seemed to have been no obvious reason why it shouldn't've worked out, anything that should have alerted Heck's friends to what was going to happen so they could have been ready to help him get through it. She was certainly pleasant enough when you met her, and by the look of it she seemed to be at least fairly well-off herself, so she didn't appear to be after Heck's money. She even took up golf, right after they were married. But then before anyone had really gotten to know her, Heck the following July put it around quietly that they'd been divorced and she'd moved back to Michigan, less than a year after they'd been married. He seemed to take it pretty well without the help of friends, though: "Just one of those things, i guess," was about all he had to say about it. "I guess some things you just never know 'til you've tried 'em, and then when you find out they weren't what you thought you don't want them around anymore. That's the way it goes, some times; just the way it goes."

The consensus was that it couldn't've been Heck's fault his business remained intact.

Heck made no secret of the pride he took in what he'd done to expand the firm, building much of it on major printing contracts he'd gone after and won from the Commonwealth. A year or so after Haskell's death, Heck had come down to Holyoke one Friday night with Carl Kuiper, a major electrical contractor from Deerfield. Carl was a big beefy man with a big stomach he shelved on the waistband of his trousers. He complained that he gained weight despite considerable exercise, snow-shoeing cross-country in the winter; in the summer rowing himself the 2.5 miles from his big stone house on Hampton Pond to his favorite fishing cove. His face was deeply red, partly from rosacea, a skin condition that his doctor said was aggravated in his case by reckless exposure to direct sunlight. "But I always wear a hat," he said, disregarding sunlight reflecting from the snow and water. His doctor also said the rosacea meant he should avoid drinking alcohol. "Ahh, all I ever drink is beer," he said. "I sweat a lot when I work out and get dehyderated. I threw up and fainted once, I let that happen to me.

Not going to again."

Kuiper's place of business was outside Hilliard's district, but his voting residence was in it and he got a good amount of business from construction companies who had big and important projects in the region. He got more from the Commonwealth, and he considered those enough reason to warrant generous support of Dan Hilliard. He was one of the stalwarts, with a regular place at the big oak table for the 'dancing-school meetings' Hilliard and Merrion held in the second-floor office on High Street. Carl introduced Heck as a kindred spirit with some darned good ideas to expand the regional industrial base. Heck always kept his checkbook with him, too, Carl said.

In due course Hilliard led Heck by the hand through the whole rigamarole of negotiating State contracts, as he made a practice of doing with many businessmen he knew from his district and nearby anywhere in the Commonwealth, really, if they came to him asking for help, because in those days he was keeping open the possibility he might want to run for Congress some day. Under Hilliard's guidance Heck tuned his pitch to the purchasing agent in the office of the Secretary of State and the Governor's commissioner of Administration and Finance. He emphasized the ripple effect that expanded light industry offering steady employment for skilled workers would have on the economy of the area, disproportionately and dangerously dependent on _ i agriculture ever since the mills along the Connecticut River shut down.

Hilliard said he meant to make that the theme of his career. "The way I see it, taking care of the voters in the district means working to improve their future," he liked to say in the Grange and Legion halls out in the dark hills after summer had receded again, the fairs were over and the nights were starting to get cold. "The future of the men and women who get up every morning and go out and do a job, come home tired at night, hoping they've done something that day that'll mean a better future for themselves and their children. A better day tomorrow, and then an even better one, the day after that. To do that we have to bring industry back here. That's the only way, and so I'm determined to do it, make this place prosper again."

"What an utter and absolute load of shit that was," Merrion said one night in Hampton Pond, fatigued and hungry but still an hour away from a drink and a meal, sliding into the driver's seat of Hilliard's car he or another worker always drove between campaign stops, so that if the candidate's car hit someone or something, no one would be able to suggest it had happened because the candidate had been speeding to his next event, negligent or drunk. It had been maybe the second or the third time Merrion'd heard him unload that particular extravagance on an audience, but the first time he'd actually listened to it. Hilliard, also dead-tired, beat, had confounded him by snarling back: "That "utter shit" I happen to believe, you fuckin' asshole. Every last fuckin' word of it. Don't you ever sneer at it again."

Merrion had subsided, knowing Hilliard did not believe it, but wanted to, because after trying it out a few times, he knew it worked.

"Sings," was the way he put it: "That stuff just sings to them."

"The way I look at politics, and how it oughta work," Hilliard would say thoughtfully when the mood washed over him again and he felt the time evangelically right, embellishing the theme that sang, 'it seems to me that it should be the man who gets the job in Boston should remember where he comes from, and he should make sure that when he gets there and while he's serving you down there, he's still listening to what's being said out here. Still listenin', and still talkin' to the people, the people who said to him: "All right, now we've heard what you said, and we're sending you to Boston. Now let's see what you can do."

"So here I am now and I'm sayin': "All right, now what else can I do?

How can your government help you? And: How can you help, what can you do, to help me make our government work better?" See, we're just getting' started here. We're not close to finished yet."

"But Jesus Mary Joseph," Hilliard would say, when they were in the office by themselves with no listeners around, when it was someone like Heck Sanderson he was teaching to dance, 'it's awful hard helping a black Protestant bastard like this. Haskell Senior was a Know Nothing.

My father told me that. No Irish in his shop. "No Irish Need Apply."

His son takes after him, too. I'd bet on it. You swallow that stuff with your mother's milk, you grow up a bigot.

"What we've always got to remember with Heck is we can't trust the son of a bitch. He didn't come down here with Kuiper that night because his heart'd leaped up when he heard me. He came down because Carl convinced him I'd be a good man for him to support, because if he did, he'd make money. And if somebody else comes along tomorrow afternoon and makes him a better offer to dump me and go with them, Heck'll drop me like hot iron. He's got harsh words to say about his old man, now that the old boy's in the ground, probably with a stake in his heart, but Heck'd join the Klan himself if they gave him sound business reasons."

But Hilliard had done his best for Sanderson just the same and his efforts worked. Heck increased his financial backing. He described himself as 'one of Dan's oldest angels." Publicly he said no one was happier than he was when the new campaign finance law went through, limiting each contributor to a maximum donation of $1,000 per candidate per primary and per general election campaign, "Saved me a ton of money." In practice Heck saw to it that each of his top ten or twelve employees and their spouses maxed out in all of Dan Hilliard's campaigns after that, at no cost to themselves. "All open, perfectly above board. My shysters looked up the law. Perfectly legal, give my fine employees a nice raise if I want, so I did. What they do with it's their business. This is still America, right?"

In the same way, Heck at first took considerable pleasure as well not only in having a son good enough to play on the PGA tour but in financing him while he assaulted it. When asked, Heck said happily it had been worth the money. "I'm glad he's got that talent. Kid's got absolutely no head for business. Don't want him around it. Golf keeps him off the street." He confided to Rob Lewis the funeral director in Amherst preferred by Protestants; a member of the state Republican committee who'd become Heck's 'best friend in the whole wide world, now that Carl Kuiper's dead' that he'd bragged a little about Julian elsewhere that year he'd been married to Lisha. He said he'd mentioned his 'son on the pro tour' to other couples they'd met playing Indian Wells in Southern California and Dorado in Puerto Rico. Heck said he thought they'd envied him; at least the men did, anyway. When Rob said he thought they probably did, Heck repeated the story to Hilliard and Merrion the next time the four of them played, and they agreed with Rob.

After Heck and Rob had gone home Hilliard and Merrion had lingered over their beers and looked at each other, and finally Hilliard shook his head and snickered, saying: "What a couple old whores we've become. "A little light hookin'? No problem." Get so you can do it th out thinkin' about it. Someone says "bitch," and you pucker up." Merrion said heavily: "Sure they did, Heck; they really envied you. Anything you say." Easy for them; they never met the kid."

For six years Julian had been one of two assistant pros at Grey Hills, an independent contractor's slot that paid him $8,500 for part-time duties that were not clearly defined. It wasn't that he didn't have the credentials. He'd passed the playing and the membership interview, attended the PGA business schools and passed the written tests. His four years at Syracuse 'majoring in pussy, best I can figure," Heck'd said resentfully one night, after seeing some of the kid's grades had given him eight of the thirty-six working credits that the PGA required. The senior pro at Grey Hills, Bolo Cormier, obliging as always, had signed off on the other twenty-eight for the work done around the club. Julian was qualified, but it was hard to see what he did.

He was supposed to be on duty in the pro shop between 7:30 and 10:30 A.M. Monday through Thursday, but often he closed the shop just before 9:30, hanging a sign in the door promising it would reopen at 11 which it did unless the other assistant, Claire Hoxey, came in late for some reason or other. According to Hilliard, wearily serving out his third rotation of three years on the executive committee, Cormier had been repeatedly invited to explain exactly why it was Julian was worth his pay and what he did to earn it.

"Bolo has a little trouble with that," Hilliard told Merrion. "He says he's "real good" coaching juniors, on the ladders. Even though they generally lose. And even though most of us, every time we see the kids out practicing, it's usually Claire teaching them.

"Bolo says that Julian's also "real good" about teaching new members and members' spouses who're taking up the game," Hilliard said. "He can't actually name any duffers Julian's transformed into eight- or nine-handicappers, but he's sure it must've happened. Some time. Some day. To someone.

"I think Bolo's memory may be going. We may want to keep an eye on him. He could get lost out there in the bushes, one of those fenny dells out on the back nine where Bobby Clark always hooks a shot when he wants to get out of sight for a few minutes and have himself a drink from that flask of Bombay eighty-proof snakebite medicine none of us know he's got in the ball-pocket of his bag. Bolo ever got confused out there around nightfall, he could wander around until morning, die of exposure, hypothermia, we got a sudden cold snap or he fell into the pool, or one of the creeks. Wild animals out there too, you know; don't believe all this stuff they're always telling you about how all the catamounts an' pumas're extinct. They're still out there, watt tn for Bolo, getting' ready to pounce on him, WOOF, turn him into quick nourishing snacks.

"Then again, of course, it could be all's the matter with Bolo is that he's got trouble remembering things that never happened. Could even be that's the cause of his trouble. I think a lot of us would have trouble, someone was to put us under a lot of pressure, situation it began to look like it could be important to remember several things, all at once, in detail, never happened at all. Test a fella's memory, you know?

"And I think just throwing this out, not really saying it happened but I think maybe that's what Bolo might be trying to do here, where Julian's performance is concerned. Remember things that never happened. That would be a very hard job. I'm not even sure I could do it.

"Because Bolo likes Heck, as we all do. He knows Heck's always been a bulwark for him when it's come to backing Bolo, like giving him more money. Naturally he's grateful, thinks highly of Heck. I myself personally remember several times that Bolo's gone after a salary increase, and a number of rude people on the board've gone so far as to suggest that maybe he isn't worth half what we're paying him now, let alone a nice raise on top of it. Heck's always stood up for Bolo, said: "No-no, no-no, no, how can you say such a thing? Bolo's salt of the earth, a gem of rare price; he deserves a big raise in pay."

"So Bolo how would you put it here, huh? Bolo's "reluctant"? He certainly is; Bolo doesn't want to say anything mean about Heck's kid that might get back to Heck and hurt his feelings, maybe make him madder'n a hornet at Bolo. Who he's always taken such good care of around here with other people's money. So he sells him down the river, next time someone tries to tie the can to Bolo. That might explain this trouble Bolo has, every time we ask him what the fuck it is that Julian does."

Dan Hilliard came up behind Merrion's chair and clasped his hands on Merrion's shoulders as Julian finished tinkering with the swings of each of his three pupils and one by one began to settle them into their stances on the tee. The first hole at Grey Hills is a par 4, 412 yards, nearly straightaway down an undulating fairway. The breeze was from the southwest, left to right, tending to push the ball toward the rough bordering the southerly bank of the Wolf River. Three bunkers surround the shaded, slightly elevated green. Julian stepped back.

After a good deal of clubhead-waggling his first client hit a low drive that stayed under the breeze but hooked a little toward the low rough about 165 yards out. He stepped back and sighed theatrically, as though he had expected at least 210. Julian said: "That'll play, Pete, that'll play. That's the worst shot you hit today, you'll go home a happy man."

"Whatcha doin', Pilgrim?" Hilliard growled in his John Wayne imitation. "Plottin' revenge on your friend for bein' late?"

"Contemplating what has to be one of the more baffling ideas of western man," Merrion said in a low voice, so that it would not carry to the tee, "Julian Sanderson in his colorful native garb. I spent the morning, good chunk of it, anyway, with a woman who's a borderline defective. Her I understand, why she may be needed in this universe of ours. Julian I don't."

Between the beginning of 1967 and the middle of 1968, Merrion would not have told Hilliard about his morning chat with Janet LeClerc, not because Hilliard would not have been interested in what had happened to her, and what had brought it about, but because during that period he and Mercy had been coming sometimes violently to terms with the fact of Donna's severe mental retardation, and there had been no way to mention the subject around either one of them that was neutral enough so that it wouldn't freshen their pain. In July of 1968 the fear of hurting them had started slowly to subside.

Dan and Mercy had shown up for what turned out to be the last season at Swift's Beach. Merrion and Sunny had tidied the house and put all their gear into his Olds. Emily and Timmy were with Danny and Mercy.

Donna was not. They were all subdued. Mercy took the kids quickly into the house before Sunny or Merrion could say much more than Hi.

When the screen door on the porch had flapped slowly shut behind them and Dan was sure that they were out of earshot, he told Merrion and Sunny that he and Mercy had finally decided to do what both of them knew had to be done. He said that preceding Wednesday he had made a call to a man who owed him his job and continuing funding for several programs under his management at the State Department of Mental Health.

Hilliard took a deep breath and said he had told the man that regardless of how many there were on the waiting list for beds in the Walter Fernald School, or how important their names were, he and his wife would bring their daughter, Donna, almost four years, to the school on Saturday morning and say good-bye to her. He told the man it had to be that way; that he'd managed once more to make Mercy see it had to be done. The burden of having the child around and trying to take care of her was going to kill her if it didn't end their marriage first. He told the man he couldn't take a chance on waiting for their turn to come, lest she change her mind again. "And Malcolm did the right thing," Hilliard said.

That morning they had risen early, having packed the car the night before with what they would need on their vacation at the beach and all the things that Mercy, weeping, thought Donna might need to have around her at the Fernald School for the next several years that would most likely be the rest of her life. Hilliard had backed Mercy's green Ford Country Squire station wagon out of the garage and down the driveway of their home on Ridge Street in Holyoke; none of them spoke. He and Mercy sat stiffly in the front with their eyes filled with tears and Timmy and Emily sat silent in the back seat, each of them touching Donna wide-eyed in her car seat in the middle, knowing Donna wasn't 'right," because they could see that, but also fearfully wondering if their daddy and their mummy some day would decide to do this to them.

They had driven down to the Massachusetts Turnpike and taken that east to Route 128 in Weston, and from there they had driven north to Waltham to the state home for retarded children. "And then we left her there,"

Hilliard said.

"It wasn't quite the same as when I was a kid and we were going to see my grandmother up in Lewiston and we had to leave Comet at the kennel because the old bat hated dogs. But it wasn't all that different either." He said it with his hands jammed in his chino pockets, his voice grinding flat and rough and low, his face desolate except for the tears in his eyes. "For one thing, even though Comet didn't know it, in a couple weeks or so we were coming back for him. We at least knew we weren't abandoning him.

"And for another thing Comet was a dog, not my kid." He sobbed and shook his head. Merrion went to him and put his hands on Hilliard's shoulders. Sunny inhaled sharply, spun around on the scrub and sand underfoot and started toward the house. Hilliard put his head down and shook it several times and wept. "Isn't quite the same thing, I find," he said. "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if none of us ever really get over what we did today, no matter how many years we may be lucky enough or unlucky enough to have left to live, depending on how you look at it."

Merrion hugged him and patted his back and crooned: "Danny, Danny, Danny; oh my poor friend Danny." Hilliard said he thought the best that he and Mercy could hope to do was to make it through what was left of the day before bedtime for the other two kids, 'who now for the rest of their lives of course will always wonder if there was something they could have done or should have done or tried to do that would've stopped their wicked parents from doing what they did to Donna, whether they want to or not."

Merrion asked him if he wanted him and Sunny to get a room at a motel and stay up with them that night. Hilliard shook his head again and said No, taking out his handkerchief and wiping his face. He said: "We have to get used to this. There's no way to do advance-work on sorrow.

We have to get used to it ourselves, by ourselves. Might as well get started now." He said he thought that it was likely that he and Mercy would get at least slightly drunk and go to bed and hope to Jesus they could sleep, but that at least they'd know in the morning it would no longer be the day that they had gone and done the thing, but the day that it would be beginning to recede into the past. "One way or the other."

"I spent this morning chatting with the borderline lady, part of my day-job," Merrion said. "A couple or three years ago the people who own the Burger Quik out on the pike, plus, I dunno, seven or eight others in the area, they dreamed up entirely on their own this very decent policy of reserving all the jobs they could for people like my kind-of-confused lady. Girl. People who are not super-bright but can learn to take directions, if there aren't too many of them and they aren't too complicated. That way they become reliable employees. This is a very fine thing for a person to be, no matter how bright he is.

Doing simple but real jobs, not make-work which they spot instantly and know right off they're being patronized. Out of those basic jobs they can make something that looks like a real life for themselves — because that's what it actually is. They wipe off tables high-fliers like you and me slobber all over and then walk away from, never cleaning up the mess we made. They pick up trays and stack them and collect trash and throw it in the bins. And then they empty the bins and heave all the rubbish in the Dumpster out in back and soak a mop in clean hot water and mop the dirt up off the floor that we fine citizens tracked in. Not particularly stimulating work, but good honest toil all the same.

"Nobody made the franchise people do this. They had this bright idea all by themselves. It looks a hell of a lot like something you and I would've been real proud of, wed been smart enough to think of it back when you were still up on the Hill showin' off. We could've passed a law to make 'em do it, hire the retards, ram it up their ass or else we're gonna take their common victualler's licenses away and put 'em outta business. Or bribe 'em with a fat tax-break to do it. We'd've been real pleased with ourselves, if wed've thought of that. But we didn't. Neither did any of the other public-spirited geniuses we hung around with all the time. This was purely a private idea.

"Initiatives," I think they're called now.

"Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences turns out to apply to private good ideas just like public ones. Full fucking force and effect. This humanitarian idea had something nasty in it nobody noticed. The franchise people were making these retards into targets for the predators. Someone's going to tell them if they're smart enough to do this donkey work and get four or five bucks an hour plus the benefits our nice franchise people also throw in, then it stands to reason they can also swindle people.

"Because that's the kind of company they start to keep, not meaning to, of course, as soon as they start getting actual paychecks. They may be small, but those paychecks represent money, and money draws serpents.

First to see if they can get those checks away from those hardworking people who aren't terribly bright, and then see if they can't think up some way to use them, manipulate them, get even larger sums of money from other people. Some other innocent person who'd be on his guard against a crook, but who'd never suspect a poor retard.

"This case the predator snared first another lady who's also not stunningly bright and who also happens to work out on the pike at the Burger Quik with the lady who's now under my supervision. The plan was to cheat an old lady in Canterbury out of her savings account. The old con game; what Miss Iscariot did to make a living before she got distracted and found herself pregnant with Judas. The drill was that the two retarded ladies pretend that they found a bag of money which would be a flash-wad, couple fives and some ones and a wad of newspapers cut up the same size. They'd show the wad to the lady that the snake selected as the sucker. She was then supposed to agree to demonstrate that they could trust her to take the bag of money to the bank which they're afraid to do themselves because they're not very bright and the banker might cheat them, and that's why they need her.

But she has to prove they can trust her. This she's supposed to do by going to the bank and withdrawing all her money from it and then giving it to them to hold while she takes the paper bag to the bank and opens a new account in all their names, and deposits what's in the bag into that account. Which all of them will then share.

"While they of course in fact will be running like hell to join up with the boss crook who, you can bank on it, has got no intention of splitting the take with them at all.

"Except that this time the Fagin picked the wrong old lady. She knows which end is up and her ass from third base. Instead of doing what they told her to do she tells the bank manager what's going on. He calls the cops.

"The cops grab the three of 'em, the two retarded ladies and the crook.

Judge Cavanaugh does the right thing and tells the crook, who happens to be a broad herself, that she wont have to worry about board and room for the next five years 'cause the State's gonna take care of that for her. Both of the retarded ladies lose their jobs, though, since one of the job rules is you have to behave yourself.

"Still and all, it didn't seem to me or the judge it wouldn't do any good to send the retarded ladies to jail. So the one of the ladies who isn't my lady got sent back to her relative in Palmer who's her next friend, but since the one I've got doesn't have a relative like that, someone Lennie can appoint to act as her legal guardian, I win Miss Janet LeClerc.

"Now, all of this's all right. I know my role in this production. I know what Janet's role is. I'm the gruff but kindly public servant who's trying to do the right thing for the person who can't take proper care of herself. I also know what my part is in what's going on right here. You and I as gentlemen of very modest wealth but very considerable taste are going to play some golf and enjoy the rewards of long life in agreeable company, as is truly meet and just. These things I have got figured out.

"What I haven't figured out is the larger purpose Julian serves. As many years as I've known the kid and liked his daddy, better on some days'n others, I have never understood what Julian's function is in the cosmic scheme of things. I see that he defies the law of gravity, and most likely several others I'd rather not know about. Existing as he does without visible means of support sufficient means of support, anyway and I'm suitably impressed. But why is he on this planet? What the hell is he for?"