"Even though they pestered you to get involved because they know with Donna in the Fernald we're interested in mental health, and you might even know something about what a counsellor needs to be. And because they figure maybe you can sweet-talk me into getting state money for their center. And maybe you might be able to do that, if everybody plays nice. But that little scheme'll go right by the boards if they decide now you're trying to run the show for them. You try to bull something through on this, they'll turn on you like dogs. People who don't like me will oppose your choice for that reason, and people who oppose you will try to get back at you through me. Don't do it.
Scuttle the statewide phase, sure, but honor the rest of the appointments."
"I really liked her, though," Mercy said.
"I understand that," Hilliard said. "You've made that very clear. Try not to do it again, with anybody else. Don't let on yet how impressed you were. Anyone asks, be open without telling them much. Be creative with the truth; if you have to, lie discreetly: misrepresent stuff they wont ever be able to prove. Say you're determined to keep an open mind. Give all the applicants fair, impartial hearings. You may've been more impressed with one or two than you were with a couple others, but that may be just the way you happened to feel the night they interviewed. May want to change your mind before you vote. You might let it slip out you think the best so far might be this what'd you say her name is?"
"Diane Whitney," Mercy said. "Her maiden name was Crouse. She's originally a midwesterner. Came here when she was still married her husband had a job at UMass." teaching economics. She's really quite pretty; sort of freckled, reddish hair, ties it back in a bun; might have a slight problem with her weight, I'd guess, but who hasn't. I can't imagine why any man who was married to her would ever want to divorce her."
"Maybe he didn't," Hilliard said. "Sometimes it's the lady's idea."
Walter Fox's divorce from Jackie had come through in the fall of 1970, a few months after Diane's appointment as the resident counselor at the Hampton Pond Community Service Center. Early in 1971 they married, Diane prevailing upon him to sell the massive white Victorian mansion in Hampton Falls left to him by his grandfather Phil and for their wedding present buy one of the properties his agency listed. It was a beautifully kept Federal Period two-story grey wooden house with white trim and a yellow door set among the oaks and maples on the rocky knob of Pynchon Hill. Her principal motive was the sunny new kitchen shrewdly installed at great but tax-deductible expense by the previous occupants, bent upon selling quickly at a good price. But they could afford it; Diane's practice had prospered nicely, and although Walter's extremely conservative management of the Fox Agency tended to keep profits small, they were steady.
Feeling herself unexpectedly settled and secure as she approached thirty, she began to develop an interest in what she called 'really serious cooking." Sabatier knives protruded from the birch block next to the stainless-steel six-burner gas range. The Zero King refrigerator dispensed cubed and cracked ice. Diane's was the first Cuisinart Mercy Hilliard saw in someone else's home.
"And the nicest thing about all of the equipment," Mercy said, 'is the absolute magic she does with it." Mercy admired her new friend boundlessly. The nine-year difference in their ages bothered neither of them at all. They talked on the phone four or five times a week and lunched every Friday in the glass-enclosed Flower Room at Gino's Hearthside, ordering salads nicoise and drinking iced tea so as to avoid gaining weight, and also so that neither Diane's patients nor Mercy's classmates in the UMass. graduate school of education would detect alcohol on their breath Friday afternoons.
To Hilhard it seemed clear from the beginning that Diane dominated the friendship. He was uneasy about it. It was Diane's example, if not something she'd said for all the difference that made that had prompted Mercy to think about what she would do if he should decide to divorce her. Mercy admitted it to him. "It happens," she said, 'it does happen to people. People you'd never expect it to. Diane said when she married Tommy and left Wisconsin-Madison to go to London with him, she never dreamed they'd ever break up. But by the time they got to UMass. she'd decided she'd better get her degree. She'd seen a couple of their friends get divorced, so she knew it did happen, and when it did the woman was a lot better off if she had something she could do.
She said that was what woke her up she didn't have any job skills. And even then it was almost too late he left for Chicago before she could finish up.
"If she hadn't been already enrolled in the program, so people knew her and got her financial help, she would've been sunk. She got enough alimony to live on, but not enough to pay tuition Without the help she would've had to drop out. Or else take a lot longer getting her degree. So it's a lot better, safer, to make sure that you're prepared. It may never happen; it'll probably never happen. But it's good to be prepared all the same. And anyway, what'm I supposed to do when Emmy and Timmy've grown up and have their own lives? I need to have a life too. A real job to go to, which I've never had. So even though I know of course I'd never divorce you I could never love anyone else I still want to have something to do.
"And I also know even though I'd never leave you, divorce isn't out of the question. A lot of your time's spent away from home, with interesting, exciting people. Doing interesting, exciting things. And more and more of them these days, are interesting and exciting young women, in the careers they're in because they're very goodlooking young women. And smart. I know you're always saying TV reporters are just pretty faces and hairdos, don't have a brain in their heads. Well excuse me, but I don't believe that. A lot of these women are smart.
That's how they got those jobs, by being smart enough to know how to capitalize on their looks to get a job that pays them more in a year than I've earned in my whole entire life.
"Some day one of those little cuties could decide she'd like to be the wife of a bright young and handsome politician who might be going places. And decide to make a play for you. Get rid of the wife and move in. Think you'd fall for it, darling?" she said.
"No, of course not," he said at once.
"Well that's nice to hear," she said, 'but I'm not sure I can be sure of that. You may not know the answer yourself. How you'd react if some woman put an effort into it, tried to lure you out of our bed into hers. And if you don't know how you'd react, as I don't want to think you do, I don't know, either, do I?"
By afternoon on the quiet Tuesday after his rancorous allegation of anti-Catholic prejudice at Grey Hills Sunday night, Hilhard in his office at the State House had decided what to do to avenge it. He had called the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and amiably suggested the first stocking of the brook and the river that ran through Grey Hills. The man who took the call and recognized the name of the chairman of Ways and Means had been prudently indifferent to the fact that the stretches of the streams the caller proposed for improvement at taxpayer expense were privately owned, posted off-limits to nonmembers of Grey Hills. The stocking had begun. Delight among the membership who chanced to catch the hatchery trout and deduced their origin was immediate and unfeigned. Hilhard was not allowed to lie in wait; Warren Corey identified him at once as the member deserving the thanks. For the next several years, until mortality put an end to it, the anglers at Grey Hills at Corey's instigation annually held "The Fish Dinner," honoring Dan Hilhard as their benefactor. If they were dissembling, they did it well enough so that he was never able to detect it.
In the years since Hilhard had left the House, no one in the legislature or the governor's cabinet had found the cost of the stocking in the budget for Fisheries and Wildlife, so no one had made a second call to Fisheries and Wildlife threatening public denunciation of the practice as unauthorized and corruptly wasteful. The stocking continued.
"Hit another one, Steve," Julian Sanderson said in the August sunshine, too warmly and indulgently. "Yeah, you're among friends here, Steverino," Pete said heartily and expansively, 'mulligans all around, all day long."
Asshole, Merrion thought disinterestedly. To Hilliard he said: "There, see what I mean?"
Hilliard laughed, releasing his grip on Merrion's shoulders, along with a gust of Courvoisiered breath into the air around them, pulling a chair up at Merrion's left. He sat down: six-two, a hundred-and-eighty-or-ninety pounds, thickening softly around the middle; the black hair starting mostly grey over the ears; a grand smile on the slightly flushed face evincing years of practice but because of the practice showing as well the warm heart behind it and clasped his hands at his waist. "Diversion, Amby," he said. "Julian is for diversion. His mission's to be a guide for the world at play time."
ELEVEN
In February of the 1982 election year Hilliard cheerfully endorsed Joseph Bryan, a House colleague, for the Democratic nomination for the largely ceremonial and thus lightly regarded office of lieutenant governor, then vacant. It was an automatic; Bryan had done many minor favors for Hilliard and was calling his chits.
In May the senior US senator with four years remaining on his term received bad news from his cardiologist: "I'm afraid the results of the angiogram don't look good, and you're too old for a transplant. Without one at your present pace you may last three years. For your family's sake as well as your own, you ought to consider retirement." Shaken, the senator had confided in his staff, and one of them, stupid or treacherous, had leaked it before the victim could collect his wits and plan his succession.
The governor, a shoo-in for re-election, had long coveted a senate seat. It was apparent that the senator would defer his resignation until after the general election so that the governor, a friend, could appoint himself to fill the vacancy. The next lieutenant governor would succeed him. Suddenly Bryan had two strong competitors. Each of them had done several very important favors for Hilliard. Each of them sought his support. Matters became complicated.
Merrion one night about a week before the '82 primaries was in a motel bar in Worcester with several reporters, among them Charlie Doyle.
Charlie's facial skin had folds as deep as those in the hides of bulldogs, and the silver sweaty stubble in the crevices glistened in the light when he changed expression — as he did with admiration, talking about Hilliard. Charlie said that as long as he'd been around the game, 'and that is one long fuckin' time," he'd never seen anyone who could duck a question better than Dan Hilliard.
"I collared him this afternoon and asked him how he stands now on the lieutenant governor thing: is he still with Bryan? If you'd been standing here beside me you'd've sworn he's answering it — I know I thought he was. He wasn't.
"He may be the best I've ever seen, it comes to slinging it. He will not lie to you at least so you could prove it. He does not refuse to answer, and he doesn't whine and plead. "Oh gee, you can't ask me to do that." Stuffs beneath him. You stop him and you say: "Hey Dan." He says: "Hey Charlie," and that's how it begins. He stands there and talks to you, and twenty minutes go by in the twinkling of an eye he doesn't seem to stop for breath.
"You just can't help but be impressed, even thankful, all this time he's giving you. And he's so earnest about it. When he gets through doing it, he's just as fresh as springtime, and you're totally worn out. And furthermore, what's more important, you don't know a single thing you didn't know before. You may know even less. At least until this afternoon, I knew he was still with Bryan.
"Now I'm not sure of that. I've had the Hilliard Treatment, and boy, do I feel good, like a million bucks, Dan Hilliard's been so good to me. When you feel like you've just had sex you've had the Hilliard Treatment. Yes, my child, you have been fucked, but it's really not so bad you've been fucked so very well. That's why all us whores like Danny; he's what makes the job worthwhile. We let him have his way with us, anytime he likes, 'cause we have a good time too."
Then Charlie Doyle had smiled. "That's how he does the magic tricks.
He gets you to help him. You don't even realize it. You went in as his adversary: this time you're gonna smoke him out, once and for fuckin' all. But before you even know it, you've become a volunteer from the audience, right beside him in the footlights, grinning like a fool.
"You know what I bet?" Charlie'd said. "I bet he's always like this now, he's so good at it. He's with the wife and kids, and one of them says to him "Daddy, can I have an ice cream cone?" He does the same song-and-dance he does for you and me, everyone he deals with, face-to-face and day-to-day. By the time he's through, the little kid has either gone to sleep, or lost all interest in the fuckin' ice cream cone. Grown up, gone off to school."
"Julian's one of those people," Hilliard said on the patio, 'that you go to when you really don't have enough on your mind. You give him money to relax you. Julian's very relaxing. He's in charge of fixing things that don't need fixing, and really don't have to work right anyway. Like golf. You do not have to play golf, much less play golf well. Golf is an option, nothing more. The problems it creates for those who get problems from it are volitional. The only reason they exist is because we wish them to. Julian solves those problems."
Julian's third client hit his drive straight down the fairway with a nice loft on it, but it traveled no more than 150 yards, down to the first little hollow. He appeared to have sacrificed distance for accuracy. Julian cleared his throat and said: "Nice and true, Paul, nice and true. Need some more oomph on it, though. Little more meat in it."
"Gotta get the old ass into it, Paul," Julian's first client said, still gloating over his drive as he got into the cart with Steve.
Merrion hoped idly the gods of golf would punish Pete severely for the rest of the day.
"Julian's optional, too," Hilliard said.
"Yeah, yeah, where the hell've you been?" Merrion said, looking at his watch. "It's twenty after and the message that you left on my machine yesterday said our tee-time was eleven-thirty. Fuck've you been all this time?"
"I was over at the house in Bell Woods," Hilliard said.
"You were over the house in Bell Woods," Merrion said. "What the hell're you doing Bell Woods? Fourteen years, you haven't lived inna place? You forget all a sudden who owns it?"
"Mercy called up from the Vineyard this morning," Hilliard said. Under the terms of the property settlement agreement Daniel and Marcia (Hackett) Hilliard had in his words 'fairly rationally reached, meaning not too much blood was let' negotiating their divorce, they retained joint ownership of the house at West Chop, the survivor of them to enjoy a tenancy for life, at his or her death the remainder of the estate to be sold and the proceeds evenly divided between Timothy and Emily Hilliard. Mercy got occupancy during August, which both of them preferred; he had the run of it from Memorial Day through the last Saturday in July.
"She gets the part she calls "the hurricane season, when it's so crowded you can't move, horribly crowded, and so hot you can't do anything." Says it proves she got screwed on the deal. I say what she got's "the best part of the summer, when it's nice and warm and everyone you want to see is there," he said. "Of course it isn't crowded when I'm there; no one who's got any sense goes there in June.
July; they wait 'til August. The sun and the Gulf Stream don't warm up the water enough to swim in until around the end of July, so all of us who go there before that either stay out of the water or freeze our balls off."
She had gotten the main house in Bell Woods estates in Hampton Pond.
"When Nick Hardigrew was still alive, he had a key to the house. I think he found out how to get into something else over there too, but who'm I to make remarks? Nobody is. Hell, one of our English teachers, queer as a green horse but funny as hell; three or four of us were talking the other day about how all of us like western movies and nobody makes them anymore, and he says he even likes westerns. And somebody said: "Really? You guys like westerns?" And he says: "Oh, yes, absolutely, faggots love westerns. Especially the Lone Ranger.
Man with a mask on; so he goes on top. And Tonto: Such a hunk. If he'd only take his shirt off. Really he is such a dr
eam. And once you know Kemo sabe means "Snookums," I mean, how could anyone ever resist?"
Everyone's got something going."
"Anyway, Mercy didn't give a key to this new lawn guy she's got now.
Told me she hasn't known him long enough yet to be sure she can trust him. So he was over there this morning and he called her and said he thought he heard water running inside, sounded like down in the cellar.
Somebody had to go over, go in and look at it, maybe get a repairman.
Tim's in Singapore with his new bride, seems to have a little better disposition than his old one did; showing her the assembly plants he runs from his office in Stamford, twelve thousand miles away. Emily's teaching summer session down in Santa Fe."
Hilliard had not lingered conversationally over his surviving daughter's living arrangements since she and a female collegue at Smith had purchased a showpiece antique farmhouse in Worthington. Since Merrion's policy was to welcome and honor personal confidences but never seek such information, he did not know whether they remained on the speaking but distant terms Hilliard had salvaged by groveling for his daughter during the publicly colorful passage of the break-up of his marriage.
In those days, to Emily's explicit disapproval, he had been frequently described in the papers as 'debonair chairman of Ways and Means' and 'man about Hill and town." The Herald called him "Dancing Dan' in the caption of a photo of him in swim trunks, surrounded by three smiling bimbos each with 'more cleavage'n Grand Canyon," Merrion told him dolefully by phone reclining on a beach chair with the ocean in the foreground and St. Thomas in the background, during a February blizzard in New England, Fred Dillinger in his Transcript column called him 'our own sunshine-lover, Dapper Dan Hilliard playing patty-cake while we all shovel."
He seemed then to be determined the parade of young women he was photographed escorting through his life would never end, one after another lissome lady in her twenties smiling at the camera with many white teeth and displaying long shiny hair, generally blonde, their large bosoms and long legs exposed to vulgar eyes and lewd speculation by microscopic dresses and 'wide belts instead of skirts." But in time the fun did end when he resigned his seat in the House in '84, four months ahead of impending electoral disaster, to become at age fifty president at Hampton Pond Community College.
A change of gravity Page 20
