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 regarde
d 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 fl
irtation 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.
A change of gravity Page 16
