'The bishop in the Thirties here McLaughlin was his name, that much I am sure of; Francis McLaughlin, I think apparently shared the predominant view of the men who run his church that a bishop can't have too much land. Or too many buildings, as far as that goes, even if they're all fallin' down. So when Jesse's remaining heirs or their lawyers, I dunno, whoever all those people were down in Phil-la-dci-phy-ay when they put his great estate up for sale here, the only bidder in sight was the diocese of Springfield.
One-hundred-and-ten-thousand American dollars. I've got no idea how or where his sacredness came up with the money. He never confided in me.
Or what on earth he planned to do with the ramshackle place. Most people thought he didn't, either. Just get it first, and then, bye and bye, think about what you're gonna do with it. You've got plenty of time. 'Forever's a very long time'; that's the way the people think in Holy Mother Church. They've got the keys to forever.'
In 1948 eighteen wealthy men of the Pioneer Valley formed a real estate trust and negotiated the purchase of the property from the diocese. The deed recited that price for the transfer of the property to the Grey Hills Association, a non-profit organization newly-established by documents drawn up by one of their leaders, Warren Corey, of Butler amp;. Corey, was 'one dollar and other valuable consideration, receipt of which is hereby acknowledged.' The actual price was not disclosed. 'Three-hundred-odd-thousand was the price you heard quoted,' Lane said, 'just under a thousand an acre. But no one outside the deal knew.'
The architects the association hired to plan and oversee the beginnings of the four-year transformation shrewdly laid out the property so that the par 71, 7,241-yard championship golf course, designed by Robert Trent Jones, formed a natural tiara for the mansion. The country club opened in 1952, 'reinventing serenity in the beautiful valley of the Connecticut River,' Life said the following year in an October feature issue entitled 'Life Goes to New England in the Fall.'
The architects and engineers curved the main entrance drive slightly, to preserve as many as possible of the tall oaks and broad maples forming a canopy over it, bordering the approach with low stone walls broken here and there for footpaths. Visitors approached the clubhouse among the undulating fairways and deceptively-beckoning greens of the most spectacular seven of the eighteen showcase holes, crossing the slightly arched stone bridge over South Brook into the circular drive at the main entrance hedged all around with rose, rhododendron, and lilac bushes.
A hexagonal brass lantern six feet long and two feet wide hung on a black chain under the porte cochere; except during high winds or snow-storms, an assistant steward brought a twelve-foot wooden stepladder from the equipment shack each Friday morning, set it up in front of the dark red front door and polished the lantern. Eight years away from celebration of its 50th anniversary season, what one columnist for Golf had called 'the crown jewel links of western New England' to the considerable displeasure of notable members of several other equally exclusive clubs between Worcester and Albany Grey Hills that August Saturday made the gritty vision of Janet LeClerc vanish from Merrion's mind like a dragon imagined in a cloud changing shape in the wind. He thought that if working Saturday morning meant you could drive your Eldorado down Valley Drive into Grey Hills and spend the rest of the day playing eighteen holes of golf and having lunch with your friend Danny Hilliard, only a fool would sleep late.
The brilliant white fine sand filling the traps was renewed every spring, trucked in from Eastham on the elbow of Cape Cod.
Forty-two-hundred-dollar annual fees, rumored soon to be increased, six hundred dollars more, from three hundred and twenty-five members, covered that. In the summer the grass remained soft, emerald-jersey green, pampered early mornings and evenings with water from the cold streams Grey's laborers had improved, and whenever Merrion went there, he remembered what Dan Hilliard had said back in 1992 as they drank Dom Perignon to celebrate their twenty years of membership: 'It doesn't matter who you are, where you've been or what you've done, or how many times you've been here: Every time that you come back, drive down Valley Drive in the shade of those venerable trees; see the sunlight making the dew silver in the morning; feel the cool breeze slipping down from the hills in the summer; or smell the maple burning in the fireplace in the fall, that same sweet lovely hush still welcomes you.
You can almost hear it whispering: 'Peace now, the struggle's interrupted. You've come; you're here; everything's all right again.'
'I know you're always telling me I just don't understand what being members at Grey Hills means to you and Dan,' Diane said the next morning, to welling her hair as she emerged from her shower, 'but if that champagne toast he made last night wasn't the corniest thing I ever heard in my life, it's sure got to be well-up-there in the running.'
'It's simple,' Merrion said, baring his teeth for inspection in the mirror, 'Grey Hills is the only thing we've ever gotten, from doing what we've done all our lives, that was strictly for us, our reward.
From the very beginning, everything that Danny's ever done in public life; everything that I've done, first when I was helping him run for office and then at the courthouse, has always been primarily for someone else's good. At least one somebody else; in Danny's case, down in the House, for all the people in his district, what he's thought would be best for them, his constituents. In my case, what would be the best thing to do in a given case that would make Cumberland or Hampton Falls or Hampton Pond or Canterbury a better place to live, either by helping to make sure that someone who's done something bad in one of the towns, violated social order, gets punished for it so that he or she maybe wont do it again and also so that someone else who sees how they got punished for doing it wont do that same thing himself.'
'Yes,' she said, drying under her breasts, 'and if I'm not mistaken, you're both fairly well paid for your valuable services, and also get health-care and retirement plans.'
'Indeed we do,' Merrion said. 'We were never rich men. We'd've been awful fools to've done it for nothing.' He turned away from the mirror. She stepped away from the tub enclosure to make way for him, bending at the same time to dry her legs, and he patted her on the left buttock. 'Nice ass,' he said, 'very nice ass.'
'Animal,' she said, straightening up and out of his reach, 'sanctimonious do-gooder, claiming virtue for making a living.'
'Anyone else in my job or Danny's would've gotten the same money we do,' he said, one foot in the tub. 'But they might not've filled them like we have. That's where the virtue is: it's in how we've done those jobs. We really do think of them as public trusts. We really do work to make sure we deserve that trust. I know it sounds like campaign bullshit, but it's the truth.'
He took his foot out of the tub and stood contemplating her in her nakedness, glad explaining and pretending he was trying to convince her was giving him the excuse. 'Grey Hills is the indulgence we've permitted ourselves to get from doing that work. It's the only thing we've ever gotten that we said from the beginning we wanted purely for us. Knowing of course that wed never really get it; as Danny said last night: 'No question about it it was totally presumptuous of us to even think it, think some day we might get in.'
This's one of the finest golf clubs in the world. For us to imagine wed ever become members was silly. It was like some high-school second baseman making his league all-star team and thinking now he's got it wired, he is definitely on his way to the major leagues and a Hall of Fame career ending up in Cooperstown: a kid's golden dream and nothing more.
'And then son of a gun, we got in.
'In a way we still can't believe that we did it. When we were young men it looked way out of reach. We couldn't afford it, and not only that, if wed had the money and tried to get in, they wouldn't've let us we weren't well-bred enough for that bunch. So it was always something beyond our wildest dreams. And then all of a sudden, the planets align and we're in. There's only one possible explanation for this: it's what we got for being good men.'
He was tumescent and stepped back from the shower, starting toward her.
She backed away holding the towel out in her left hand at arm's length and grabbing the other end with her right as though intending to snap him with it. She said smiling: 'No, no, Simba, not playtime now; time to wash. Coffee first. Back off and get yourself into that shower.
Tell yourself what a grand public servant you are while you're getting yourself clean. I've had enough of your pious guff.'
'The thing men always have to remember about women,' he said as though talking to himself, stepping into the shower, 'is the ones who're sexy lack soul.'
On a gray Saturday in Holyoke in the early spring of 1966, Dan Hilhard in his High Street office had invited Merrion to tell him what he wanted, nodding approvingly as he listened. 'Uh-huh,' Hilliard'd said, 'that would make a
