small luncheon that he'd thrown in the private dining room at Henry's Grist Mill. He'd invited about thirty people to celebrate his official promotion to first assistant clerk of the District Court of Western Hampshire (meaning: Clerk of Court-designate).
Clerk of Court Richie Hammond after stalling six months had at last formally appointed Merrion to his old slot under Larry Lane. Hammond had instinctively disliked Merrion from the first time they met, knowing on first sight he was a smart-ass. Ever since Larry Lane had died he had been forlornly hoping either that someone with more clout would become interested in the job Hammond knew that was unlikely; Dan Hilliard was in the most formidable years of his ascent or failing that, perhaps God in His wisdom and goodness would strike Merrion dead.
God had not.
Richie had stopped stalling after being credibly threatened with summary dismissal from his own place. The threat had come in the form of a menacing phone call placed by a deputy administrator in the Administrative Office of the District Court Department in Salem. He said that the chief judge had just gotten an upsetting call about the next year's judicial budget from the chairman of House Ways and Means.
The administrator had reported grimly that the chairman of Ways and Means appeared to be not only very angry but 'a very close personal friend of this Ambrose Merrion,' as well, and asked Richie Hammond if he'd been aware of that fact. When Richie said he had been 'Everybody out here knows they're asshole buddies; that's the only reason Merrion got the goddamned job he's got' the chief administrative clerk had said in a soft savage voice: 'Then would you mind telling me, so I can tell the judge, who's practically beside himself with fucking curiosity I think it's curiosity; it may be something else exactly why the fuck it is he had to get the call he got and I have to make this call right now, to get you to do what any fucking asshole with the brain of a retarded pigeon would've known from on the first day what he'd better do right fucking off or get his fucking balk cut off? Or would you rather quit right now, and we'll give Merrion your job would you like that better?'
Hammond had soberly accepted Merrion's solemn invitation to attend the joyous luncheon, but to the surprise of neither of them suffered an attack of the Twenty-four-hour Convenient Grippe when the day for it arrived.
'When Rose was among us,' Polly said, 'she had designs on my poor little Ambrose, and selfish ones at that. She'd always had it in her mind that if she ever had any sons of her own it'd be a good thing for her if one of them went into the priesthood. You know what they used to tell all the good Catholic mothers: 'If you've a son a priest, your place in heaven's guaranteed.' But she didn't have any, so that was a bit of a handicap for her, you see? In that respect, at least, she'd left a stone unturned.
'That was not her way at all, neglecting things. Of course she hadn't had any wayward sons, either, which'd also been known to've happened to perfectly good church-going Catholic mothers. No naughty boys she would've had to pray for, make novenas to Saint Jude for, the patron saint of the Impossible, and go and visit Sunday mornings down at the lock-up, or on Tuesdays and the weekends at county jail or something, like some unfortunate women she knew and don't think she ever let 'em forget it, either; not for one stinkin' minute did she ever do that.
'Those poor unfortunate creatures with those terrible crosses to bear, the poor things.'
'But that still didn't give her one to bake the cookies for, and send down to the seminary, either, and she couldn't let herself forget that.
I don't think nuns counted in that bounty-hunt and they didn't take young ladies in the priesthood. If they had, I think she would've thought nothing of wrapping me up and sending me along, 'see what you can do with this one. Not much to look at maybe, but good with pots and pans, and she knows how to do a wash. Send her back if it looks like she isn't going to work out for you.' But the choice wasn't available.
'So you could see what she was thinking, the minute he was born and we knew he was a boy. She thought maybe Ambrose might become a priest, if she took a hand in it as she generally did everything that happened within a mile or two of her, and played her cards right, of course.
Wasn't his namesake a famous bishop? And a saint? The bishop who baptized Saint Augustine, by God? Well, didn't that tell you something? Meaning that if the vocation didn't come naturally to our little boy, if the Holy Ghost didn't give him a good bat on the head and tell him what he ought to do, well then, she might get involved herself in working out the matter. Since she was pretty sure she knew what would've been God's will, if He'd only just spent the time and taken the proper interest in it. If you know what I mean. Bashfulness was not a thing that troubled her.
'So for a while then, after Pat and I were first married and Amby'd come into the world after only the bare decent interval, there, I'm sure she had her eye on him. Not that I'd want you to think, for even one moment, that my dear mother Rose actually had a thing to be concerned about where getting into heaven was concerned. Far from it butter wouldn't've melted in her mouth, not in that one's. No, it was just that she was always one to believe that where salvation was concerned, you couldn't be too careful. If now a grandson was the closest she could come to meeting the requirements, well, that was the best she could do. Couldn't ask for more than that. At least 'til I told her I didn't think grandsons counted, met the tariff for admission to Jerusalem, the holy city, the same way that sons do. And so that more or less cut down her zeal.
'It really was all for the best. If Ambrose'd gone into the church, you know, none of you here in this room or even at this table would've ever heard of him at all. He'd most likely be the curate in a small parish 'way up in the State of Maine someplace, up there on the forty-fifth parallel, on the Canadian border. And he'd be perfectly happy, you know? Completely at peace with the world. My boy's a humble man.'
'At least she didn't say the celibacy stuff would've been no trouble for you,' Mary Pat Sweeney had said to him that night in the apartment he'd been renting then in Hampton Pond. 'If she had then I'd've known for sure I'd come to the wrong funeral after all.' Mary Pat had kept about a hundred-fifteen pounds in what seemed like constant merry motion back in those days, and not just in her office down in Springfield at Massachusetts Mutual, or at the evening and weekend county Democratic meetings, either.
Mary Pat was well-known far and wide 'Oh sure, both ways, north and south, up and down the river,' as she used to say herself, 'good-time Mary Pat' for being the one person that you had to sign up before you could be really sure that what you had in mind to do would be a success. Merrion admitted cheerfully that her reddish hair and greenish eyes were the sights he first looked for when he walked into a room, 'just like everybody else does. Everybody else.'
She believed in realism, just as he and Dan did. While Sunny was around but stationed far away from home, he 'always seemed to get along real good with Mary Pat,' as Polly said from time to time, with some insistent wistfulness, the closest that she ever came to declaring her preference for Mary Pat among his girlfriends that she'd met. That was fully close enough for him to implying her somewhat-less-than-full approval of then-Lieutenant later Captain Geraldine Keller, USAF. Mary Pat in those days without discussion understood and apparently accepted the fact that she was his second-best girl and probably always would be no more than that. She appeared to believe that the reason was timing: he'd met Sunny first, at UMass.' and because he was a loyal man, Sunny would remain first as long as they lived. Many times without wishing Sunny any ill Mary Pat therefore sincerely and coolly wished her dead.
She excused such thoughts to the accuser in her mind with the mitigation that she never actually prayed for Keller's death. That would have been deliberate; she wasn't willing anything; she simply couldn't help thinking that it would have been much more convenient for her and better for Ambrose as well, if Sunny were to die young without any pain at all, peacefully, in her sleep.
Mary Pat further understood without being told that Merrion could stand it if she should happen to run into someone else who would replace him as first in her love (although she hadn't wanted the assurance, and would have summarily rejected it if he'd offered it). So except for that first fucking week in fucking July every god-damned fucking year, and all the other fucking times fucking Sunny came home on fucking leave again, goddammit, always unexpectedly because unwanted by Mary Pat she and Amby did have their good times.
It wasn't easy for her. Mary Pat said nothing to nobody about nothing, as she put it, but then she didn't have to; she turned up the volume on her desk radio whenever WHYN-AM played 'Time Is on My Side,' by the Rolling Stones, and everyone who knew and liked her including all the men, and she knew a lot of them, from her interest in politics also knew she played the waiting game. She was generally steadfast and obdurate, silent in receipt of truly well-meant good advice from friends including her boss, Carol, a peach, who was really good to her and mentioned it only once until they stopped giving it, content to eyebrow smart remarks. She did allow a rather dumpy woman in Agents Accounts named Priscilla, from Three Rivers, whom she didn't even like, to get away with saying one beautiful June day during lunch outside on the lawn that she was 'never sure if the reason Sweeney's cubicle's
