Death at the Member Guest

by James Y. Bartlett

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was such a nice morning that I put the top down on my Ninety-something Mustang, a process which involved so much tugging and cursing that it usually wasn’t worth the effort. My car has more than a few years and miles on it, and all the rusty corners and peeling paint show it. But in Boston, the auto-theft capital of the world, it pays to have an old, beat-up set of wheels. At least you can usually count on them being there when you’re ready to roll. The thieves tend to concentrate on Jeeps and Porsches and Acuras and other vehicles that look like they have some residual value. My heap looks, and probably is, totally value-free.

  Clubs, shoes, clothes and a supply of new balls stashed in the Mustang’s trunk, I motored out of the Back Bay, up Storrow Drive past a Charles River that sparkled in the bright fall sunshine and reflected the whitewashed bell towers of the Harvard campus. Ve-ri-tas you mothers, I waved across the river, I’m going to play some golf.

  I followed Route 2 north through Arlington and Belmont, cut eastwards a way on 128 and then swung north onto the ancient Route 3 highway signposted for Lowell and New Hampshire. This highway had been built roughly at the same time that cars had been invented and the bumpy, cracked pavement looked every bit its age.

  Traffic was light at midmorning, so I had the luxury of being able to admire the trees and meadows as they flashed past. Outside of Boston proper, Massachusetts quickly becomes quite rural. The quality of light changes, I believe, at some point during Labor Day weekend, when the harsh, humid and hazy glare of summer changes over to a crisper, softer light slightly tinged with gold. The trees sharpen in definition as fall proceeds, and the leaves begin their annual turn from deep green to golds and russets and bright yellows. Sometime around Thanksgiving, the quality of light changes again, just as the leaves drop, and the icy blue tones of winter seep through the barren woods.

  The low-lying wetlands along both sides of the highway were choked with waving masses of purple wort, a tall, spindly weed topped with masses of purple buds. The paper had carried a story a few weeks earlier about the environmental problem posed by the purple wort. Originally, I had read, the seeds for the plant had been imported accidentally from England, carried in the bales of sheep’s wool shipped over to New England’s finishing mills. Once it took root around the many ponds and streams of eastern New England, the purple wort took off, far from whatever natural predators controlled it back in the Olde Sod, and its fast-growing root system was now threatening to choke out the ecosystems of most of Massachusetts’ wetlands. Aghast, environmentalists were thinking of importing a special breed of English beetle to help keep the spread under control. And after the beetles are done munching on purple wort, they’ll probably start in on the red maples, the wolf’s bane pines or some other indigenous plant we don’t want to lose. When will they learn to stop screwing around with Mother Nature?

  The purple wort waved happily in the breeze as I rumbled over a bridge that spanned a dark, serpentine creek identified as the Concord River. I wondered if there had been any purple wort growing on the banks when ole Henry D. Thoreau paddled his canoe downriver from Concord to explore. If there had been, I’m sure he would have described it for us in exhausting detail. Since the son-of-a-bitch never worked a day in his life, he had plenty of time for providing rich detail.

  Certainly, Thoreau wouldn’t recognize today’s Concord River, especially when he got to its confluence with the Merrimac River that poured out of New Hampshire on its way to the Atlantic. There, he would have happened upon the ugly brick-factory and old mill town of Lowell.

  When Henry David had paddled through, Lowell was just beginning its run as the cradle of the industrial revolution in America. In the early years of the 19th century, a group of Boston capitalists had gone looking for some good manufacturing sites. Because the technology of the day was powered by water, they came to a place along the Merrimac River where it descended, in a series of rapids and waterfalls, several hundred feet in less than a mile. The capitalists’ engineers built an elaborate series of canals and waterways designed to harness the power of that falling water and transfer it to the huge turbines that were built to power the looms of the mills that sprang up overnight along the river’s banks. Thus was Lowell born.

  Lowell’s main product was textiles. The Boston capitalists had been to the great English mill cities of Birmingham, Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent and had come home absolutely appalled at the squalor, the slave-like conditions of the workers and the widespread use of child labor. American industry, they declared, was going to be different and better.

  But as the rows of mills were built, the capitalists needed warm bodies to run the looms. And in the New England of the 1830’s, there was really only one readily available source of labor: farm girls. Huge families were the rule in the rural communities of New England, in part because life expectancy was so limited, and in part because farms needed lots of willing young hands to operate. But girls were less advantageous than a family of strong boys. Girls could keep house, but not work in the fields. Keeping them fed and clothed added to the farm’s bottom-line expense.

  So the mill owners proposed a deal to New England’s farmer fathers. Send us your daughters to work in the mills of Lowell, they said, and we’ll pay them a good salary (about five cents a week), house them in dormitories, make sure they eat well, and are protected from moral decay. The farm girls, it was promised, would also be taught to read and write, and the mills will bring in lecturers and musical concerts and plays to further the culture and discernment of the young ladies. In two year’s time, they will return to the farm wiser, more educated, more cultured and with some pocket money … all of which might help them land a good husband.

  To both farmer and daughter, this all sounded too good to pass up. So thousands of farm girls from Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont made their way to the big cities, especially Lowell, to seek their fortunes in the mills. Of course, the mill owners had conveniently skipped over the part about the workday lasting from 6 in the morning until 8 at night, with but a brief stop for lunch. Or the part about the incessant, eardrum-bursting noise of a thousand looms working at once. Or the part about the excellent chance of losing fingers, or a hand, or an entire arm in the never-stopping gears and flywheels. Or the part about the deductions from that nickel a week for room and board and “extras.” By the time the farm girls had settled in, the contracts had been signed and they were forced to live out the two or three-year term.

  It was called the Lowell Experiment and it was celebrated around the world as the model of enlightened industrialism. Charles Dickens, no stranger to the horrors of the Industrial Age, dropped by to see for himself and deliver a lecture to an audience of exhausted farm girls. The mill owners, of course, made a killing, and it was their greed that eventually undermined the entire system.

  For after some time, the educated farm girls realized they were being exploited, and asked for more than that nickel a week. Horrified, the mill owners fired the farm girls en masse and shipped them back to their rural lives. The new labor force consisted of immigrants — new arrivals from Ireland and Italy, from French Canada and Greece — who were more than willing to do the endless, back-breaking work in the mills for the very same nickel a week. A few generations later, those immigrants began to organize unions to ask for a bit more, and the mill owners closed down the plants in Lowell and took them South, to the hills and hollers of Carolina and Georgia and West Virginia where there were plenty of people willing to work for a nickel a week. And in recent decades, the process has continued as the mill owners close down their Southern plants and take them to Indonesia and Honduras and China where, once again, there is an unending supply of people desperate for that nickel-a-week bonanza.

  It was not a pretty history, I mused as I motored past the city and headed north towards New Hampshire. But at least the lucre of the mills had created a wealthy group of families in Lowell who in turn had founded the Shuttlecock Club. Out of all
those decades of human misery, a great golf course had been born. Not exactly a balancing out on the scales of Justice, considering all the lives, from farm girls to Indonesians, that had endured a sweaty misery. But for a weekend of fun, I decided I was grateful.

  The Shuttlecock Club, located on a small island in the broad reaches of the Merrimac River north of Lowell, had originally been a true “country club” for the wealthy elite of the city. It had been a place to escape for a weekend or a week or two in the summer, where members could pitch tents in the woods, swim in the river, hike through the hills, canoe or row, and just kick back away from the noisy and grimy city. Rowing had been a popular early pastime, followed by biking, until, around 1909, the members had constructed the first rudimentary holes of a golf course. Those first few holes were kept on Shuttlecock’s small island, across a narrow creek from the mainland. But a few years later, as the game of golf became popular among the wealthy class in America, the members had called in Donald Ross, the premiere architect of his era, to construct a full-length course. The club purchased a hundred acres of farmland on the mainland, across that narrow creek, and Ross was turned loose. His routing started and ended on the island, crossing the creek twice and running through the hilly terrain before returning to a beautiful final green positioned in the shadow of a gorgeous, cedar-shingled, three-story clubhouse perched on a bluff at the north end of the island.

  Shuttlecock was Ross at his finest. He was a master of subtlety who could make what looked to be easy incredibly hard. Many of his holes left the golfer with an out, a place to miss or to lay up. But then he demanded the most precise of recovery shots to challenging targets. Shuttlecock was favored with Ross’ favorite defence, the crowned green. Shaped like an inverted saucer, the greens on many holes looked big and inviting, but because they fell off sharply at the edges, the acceptable target for getting and keeping a ball on the putting surface was actually quite small. Shuttlecock also had typical Rossian short holes that looked wide and inviting, but with a combination of overhanging trees, deep bunkers or fingers of gnarled rough, actually demanded precise play. There were short par-fives that invited a golfer to go for the green in two, but contained all kinds of evil places lying in wait for a ball that was not quite perfectly struck.

  The one thing I remembered most about Shuttlecock from the handful of times I had played the course with Jack Connolly was the greens. Jack had explained that some years before the club’s greens superintendent, a rather feisty Portuguese immigrant, had developed his own strain of northern bentgrass. Through careful propagation, this new variety, called Shuttlecock Velvet, had eventually been installed on all the greens, and exported to other clubs in the region. The result was a putting surface unlike any other I had ever seen, including those at the famed Augusta National. Shuttlecock Velvet, especially after years of careful cultivation, grew unusually thick and rich, so that even a high-flying sand wedge from 70 yards would make hardly a dent in the surface. Yet the grass provided an incredibly smooth and fast surface, making Shuttlecock’s greens lightening quick and treacherously sloped. I knew that in preparation for the weekend’s Member-Guest, the greens superintendent would shave those greens down to make them even quicker. He’d want to show off his course to the guests of his members by making it as tough and therefore as memorable as possible.

  My stomach lurched in anticipation. There is nothing more fun than playing a wonderful old course in good weather, with good friends, in a spirited competition. The weekend promised to have everything I treasure: camaraderie, laughter, fun, good golf and a competition designed to test both mind and skill.

  I exited Route 3 just before it crossed the line into New Hampshire, motored through the tiny, whitewashed village of Tyngsboro, and crossed over the Merrimac on a rusting, green-girder suspension bridge. Turning right, I headed downstream. The river ran broad and deep beside the road. The Merrimac started as a pristine stream deep in the rocky foothills of the White Mountain chain in New Hampshire. For generations now, it had been anything but pristine. Starting in Concord, the river flowed through a succession of ugly, brick-lined mill towns that all had roughly the same history as Lowell. Over the generations, each of these cities – Concord, Manchester, Nashua, Lowell, Lawrence, Haverhill – had used the river for its free-flowing power, and, as a way of thanks, had dumped sewage and wastes and toxic nasties into the water’s downstream flow. By the time the river reached the Atlantic at Newburyport, it had been turned into a disgusting mess. In the 1960s, the river had been considered one of the most polluted waterways in the entire nation. Then, thanks to governmental action and a better awareness of ecological system management, they started to clean up the river. All the cities along the route installed waste treatment plants, and with most of the textile mills moving South, there wasn’t as much toxic crap being dumped into the river. I had read that some Atlantic salmon had been caught recently, well upstream from the river’s mouth. Perhaps there is some hope for us, after all.

  The river disappeared from view as I rounded a bend, and then I caught sight of the Shuttlecock Club’s imposing clubhouse on its bluff at the end of its island. The thin stream that separated the island from the mainland was no more than 100 feet across, but I could imagine that it must have seemed miles wide to the factory workers and immigrants who gazed across at the verdant green fairways, the shingled clubhouse and the beautifully dressed set that partied gaily on the other side.

  I drove across the rumbling boards on the old bridge that spanned the stream and glided to a stop on the other side. The entry road cut directly across the first fairway, a short par-four, and I remembered to stop and look for golfers who might be teeing off to the right. I didn’t really care about getting another dent in the body work, but I did have the top down and I wasn’t anxious to field a Titleist to the noggin.

  Coast clear, I guided my heap down the curving driveway and under a canopy of broad oaks and tall pines. The roadway swept past the 18th hole on the left, and then forked. Straight ahead was the clubhouse, rising majestically in the bright autumn sun. I took the road to the right and found a place to park near the old, ivy-covered golf house. The squat little brick-and-clapboard building sat apologetically behind the first tee. Where the imposing main clubhouse bespoke generations of wealth and power, with its broad lawn, flower beds in a riot of late-season color, and a towering flagpole which carried a huge Old Glory and a somewhat smaller state flag – the golf house was something of an afterthought. It was obviously designed merely as a place to change one’s shoes, buy some golf balls and perhaps have a drink. There was a newer, tacked-on section that held a windowed grille room, and a narrow porch overlooking the first tee. Still the place had a lot of charm, in a weathered, old-golf-club kind of way. I’d seen a lot worse.

  I unloaded my golf bag, handed it to a kid dressed in a Shuttlecock Club golf shirt and went inside to find Jack Connolly.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I climbed the wooden stairs onto the front porch and walked through the old screen door into the pro shop. Standing behind the counter at the end of the room, frowning at a thick sheaf of papers, was Shuttlecock’s head pro, Ted McDaggert.

  “Hey, Teddy,” I called out.

  He looked up from his work, recognized me, and his face broke out in a wide smile.

  “Hacker!” he exclaimed, coming around the counter to shake my hand. “How the hell are ya? Jackie told me you were coming up to play with him this weekend.”

  McDaggert was about six feet tall and thick around the torso. His ruddy Irish face was topped with a mop of unruly orange hair – I’d heard it called an “Irish ‘fro.” His face was freckled, slightly jowly, and, I noted, unusually pale for someone who nominally spends a good part of his time out in the sunshine playing and teaching golf. But I also knew that few people who actually work in the golf business get to play the game, especially club pros. He was wearing the “uniform:” Kelly-green polyester Sansabelt slacks, a white pique knit polo wi
th a green and purple geometric design, and black-and-white oxford teaching shoes.

  As we made small talk about the events in the world of golf during the summer, I glanced around Teddy’s pro shop. The room was small, maybe twenty feet by forty, and dark, with just one side window and the screen door permitting some filtered natural light to penetrate. The golf merchandise was crammed into every nook and cranny. Four wooden shelves took up most of the center of the room, and were filled with stacks of golf shirts, shorts and sweaters. More clothes hung on racks against two of the walls. Boxes of iron sets and long rows of drivers and putters competed for attention with a glass-fronted counter filled with boxes of balls. It was claustrophobic.

  I have been in pro shops around the country that rival the selling floor at Bloomingdale’s for retail presentation, with soft, indirect lighting, piped-in Muzak, stylish mannequins modeling the latest chic couture, and thick plush carpeting. Teddy McDaggert’s pro shop was the antithesis of that kind of retail elegance. His carpets were worn in well-used traffic patterns in and out the doors, his fixtures were old and scratched, and he seemed to be presenting the theme of golf as chaos. But I imagined it worked for Teddy, who, after all, had something of a captive audience in the members of the Shuttlecock Club. He probably knew exactly where everything was, too.

  “Have you seen Jackie this morning?” I asked.

  “I think he’s upstairs playing cards,” Ted said, smiling at me. “Hope you can keep him sober enough to play some golf this weekend.”

  “Good luck to me and the Red Sox,” I said, smiling and shaking my head. We both knew that Jack Connolly pretty much did whatever Jack Connolly felt like doing, and never worried much about the consequences. And if he decided he wanted to get, and stay, tanked for most of the weekend, golf tournament or no, that’s what he would do.