'If I recommend you buy a certain stock, and you do it and make money, you'll be happy. You may even call me up and thank me. But you'll expect to keep the profit as you should; it was your money that you risked. If you lose money, though, as you very well might, then you'll be unhappy. And even though of course I know you wont expect me to make good your loss, you certainly wont call me up and thank me. In fact you'll probably secretly blame me for your loss, because if I hadn't put it into your head to buy that stock, you wouldn't've lost your money.
'So, when I come in here for a filling after that, what you'll remember wont be that you solicited the recommendation that caused you to lose money it will be that you lost your money because you did something that I told you to do. And therefore you might decide that instead of trying very hard not to hurt me, or hurt me as little as possible, you wouldn't mind hurting me at all, because I made you lose your money. So it would probably be best for me if I found another dentist.
'I don't want to do that. You've been a good dentist. I've been coming to you for years. I've got you all trained. I'm too old now to break in a new one. I think much too highly of your dental skills to risk having to do that, by giving you market advice that makes it so I don't dare to come in here anymore.
'Now having said that I must warn you: If you hurt me now, and I decide you did it on purpose because I refused to make you rich, I'll have to have you arrested and put in jail for battery.'
'My father told Chassy he thought his explanation sounded reasonable and he'd do his best not to hurt him with the drill. He said what he should've said at that point was that if Chassy didn't start paying his bills on time instead of making him wait ninety days, he'd have him arrested, judge or not, and thrown in jail as a deadbeat. Spring family always took their sweet time paying their dental bills. But he didn't. Basically my father likes Chassy all right; just doesn't like having to wait to get paid for fixing his teeth.'
'Okay then,' Merrion said, 'Spring hasn't got a horse in this race.
Judge Cavanaugh: Has he got a family? I don't know.'
'The Boy Judge,' Hilliard said, chuckling. 'Fuckin' Freddie Dillinger? That's what he called Lennie Cavanaugh, his appointment was first announced ever since then, too, every time he's been in the news.
It's really a wonder, nobody's ever horsewhipped Fred; just beat the old-fashioned shit out of him, some of the things he's put in that column Nineteen-fifty-nine that was, when Lennie got that job; remember because that was the year Mercy and I got married. He was pretty young, though not even thirty, I recall. So that'd make him now, what, thirty-five, thirty-six? Nah, no kid of his'd be old enough. Might have a relative out there someplace, though, who's had trouble dressing and feeding himself. We wouldn't know.'
'Yeah, he could,' Merrion said. 'He could also have trouble digesting fried fatty foods and we wouldn't know that either. Look, I don't want to sit around with you and do our damnedest to dream up a hundred good reasons why I can't get this job. What I want to do is figure out how we can do the same thing for me that the two of us've done for so many other people, nowhere as deserving as I am: figure out some way so that I can get this job that's what I want to do.'
'I'm sorry,' Hilliard said. 'I'm so used to doing what we do when we get a job-hunter in here, I guess I must've forgotten who I was talking to.'
'Yeah,' Merrion said. 'Well, this one time I'll overlook it. I did what you said, got some background on Lane. Since according to you he seems to be the chief hurdle standing 'tween me and the job. He's got a whole bunch of kids, eight of them. But only two of them don't already have jobs, and both of them're married daughters that don't even live around here. One of them lives in Japan or some other place nobody ever heard of. Her husband's with the State Department. The other one's married to some guy who works for a paint company. All the others've got jobs.'
'How'd you get this?' Hilliard said.
'Turns out my mother knows him,' Merrion said. 'His wife I guess isn't a very good cook. He gets all their pies and cookies from Slade's Bakery. You know the one I mean. Used to also be a cafeteria, back when we still had the trains coming through. Ma says he's a regular bear for the cookies, oatmeal raisin, chocolate chip. Goes through couple dozen a week, half a dozen or so at a time. Monday nights, Wednesday nights, then a dozen he comes in on Friday. Plus a loaf of the brown bread, for Saturday night I guess him and the wife have baked beans. He's never in a very big hurry, Ma says, always got plenty of time to chat. He calls her 'Polly,' like all her friends do, and she calls him 'Mister Lane.' Now.'
'What'd she used to call him?' Hilliard said. ''Franklin Delano Roosevelt'?'
'She called him 'Judge,' Merrion said. 'But then someone told her it was Chris; he was still living at home then, after I'd moved out that he's just the clerk. 'He's not the judge. He doesn't decide anything.'
'Her reaction was: 'Well, what did I know, he was only the clerk?
Someone told me he worked at the courthouse. Who works at the courthouse, huh? Judges. How'm I supposed to know he wasn't one? I was never inside it, thank God none of my family was ever arrested. We always behaved ourselves. He certainly looked like a judge ought to look, always very well-dressed and so forth. Although come to think of it, kind of flashy, for a judge. But always a jacket and tie, winter, summer or fall; shoes always shined; a clean shirt and a hat, always a hat. A felt hat in the winter, straw hat in the summer. Nice camel-hair overcoat in the cold weather. Mister Lane is a very sharp dresser.' ''Well,' Chris tells her, 'how he dresses doesn't count. It's what he does that counts. And all he does is file papers no one ever looks at, and collect the money for tickets. It's not like he can send you to jail. He don't amount to a piss hole inna snow.'
'To your mother he said that?' Hilliard said. 'Did your father rise up out of the grave and belt him one? Pat might've said piss hole out in back at Valley Ford, but never in front of her.'
'Well, the general idea was all I meant,' Merrion said. 'I don't know what Chris actually said. He was just givin' the general idea. Which's what I'm trying to give to you here. I asked my mother about him. I think I can work for this guy. I think it'd work out all right. Not someone I would call, I was lookin' for a guy go out'n have a few with, no, but otherwise, I see no problem.
'And let's not get carried away with ourselves here, either, when we're discussing this thing. This job that Lane's got with nobody in it, it isn't that big a thing. 'I get by on it': was what Dad used to call his job, and that's all this job is, too. I can get by on it. A steady check is what I want. I never had any ambition.
'My own mother'll tell you that, if I'm not careful. God knows she's told me enough she's always giving me that. 'Second prize, the small change, the leftovers. You poor kid, you've simply got no ambition at all.'
Merrion had listened many times while she low-rated him to others. 'It just isn't in Ambrose's nature to put himself forward, you know? He's tall enough and strong enough and fat enough, too, God knows he should be, see the way he eats all the time. His father used to say he wasn't a bad athlete. Not that he was ever a real good athlete either that might've meant he'd stand out.
'Pat never seemed to mind, though. I think now it was because he never aimed too high himself. Pat was always careful not to make himself conspicuous. Get his name in the papers, so someone heard about him. I think he approved of that attitude Amby had. He said if Amby didn't watch out, wasn't careful, he'd get too good at something in school, and pretty soon he'd wind up going far away to some fine university or something. I used to think he didn't mean it; that was his way of pushing Amby, getting him to do something. But now I'm not so sure.
'He'd say Amby didn't want people to think he wanted something really good to happen: 'Mustn't let 'em catch you aiming too high for anything in this world. You might get it. Then God only knows what could happen. People might not like you anymore. Say you went high-hat on them, something bad like that might happen. It's just not worth takin' the risk, you know?' After a while Pat had us all convinced, Chris and me and Amby both. 'Chris's the one who's got his eye on the moon. What Ambrose wants is for people to like him, to be the hero's best friend, covers his backside for him. Never the hero himself.'
Thirty years later Polly (Flavin) Merrion late that benign Saturday afternoon in August lay non compos mentis at age seventy-nine in the bed in the bright sunny room with southwestern exposure on a small enclosed patio overlooking a round pool with a tulip-shaped recirculattng fountain at St. Mary's on the Hilltop in West Springfield, picking at the hem on the lightweight white wool blanket, her sparse white hair neatly trimmed, set and combed, her faultless white skin clear and softly lotioned, a hint of color on her lips, her blue eyes 'as clear as Gilbey's gin,' as her dear Pat had used to say, just to get her goat. It had been about three years since she'd heckled her oldest son.
'My own dear mother, Rose, now,' Polly usually began, when giving him a roasting he understood it to be her way of bragging about him running on the first part of a manhattan as she had been one day in March of 1973 at a
