Makes you kinda think twice, all this stuff we keep hearin' all the time, cutting' back on Medicare. Nuns look to me as though they're getting' pretty old themselves, getting' right up there. And no young ones comin' up, young girls goin' inna convents, you believe what you read inna paper. Makes you wonder a little, you know? 'Well, what's gonna happen, we get old and so forth, take care of us?' Kind of makes you stop and think: 'Whoa, what we doin' to ourselves here?'
'Danny's still do in' good, is he?' Merrion wasn't sure but Whalen seemed to be showing more interest.
'Oh yeah, Danny's always doin' great,' Merrion said, dialing up his alertness a notch or two. 'Doin' very well, he is. Extremely well, in fact. Kicked the shit out of me again out on the course today, for one example cost me the usual twenny bucks. So yeah, I'd say he's doin' all right. Danny's lookin' good.'
This'd be out at Grey Hills there, wouldn't it?' Whalen said, slightly disconcerting Merrion by seeming to act as though he, not Merrion, had been the fisherman feeling the soft tenative strike and Merrion, not he, was going to be the fish. 'You and him, Danny Hilliard: this'd be the spot there where you two guys always play?'
'Well, ah, yeah,' Merrion said, thrilling slightly, finding himself either playing or being played in a game he didn't fully understand but which seemed as though it could be dangerous, 'that's where we belong.
So that's where we generally play. Pay all that money, you know, to belong, get so you know the course pretty good — doesn't hardly seem to make much sense, really, you then go and play somewhere else.'
'I heard that's a pretty hard place to get into,' Whalen said, musing.
'Heard it costs a lot of money, too. Arm and your other fuckin' leg to go with it, as the fella likes to say. 'Course Danny and you, you can prolly afford it. Danny really must've done awful good in that job, what I hear, when he was bein' a rep. House in Bell Woods anna one onna Cape, Martha's Vineyard, wherever it was.'
'Well,' Merrion said, 'he doesn't…'
'You know I never been on Martha's Vineyard?' Whalen said it with a note of surprise. 'Never went there in my life. Always thought I'd like to some day. People say it's so nice.' He paused and considered.
'Lots of things I haven't done,' he said, and frowned. Then he shook his head once, as though clearing it.
'An' thenna divorce; he had that too, did dun he, few years ago?'
Whalen said. Merrion nodded. 'Sure, that's what I thought,' Whalen said. 'And they can be very expensive. Have to figure that cost him some dough. So I wouldn't know how much he's got left, probably not very much. But still, like I say, must've done awful good, for a guy that was just a state rep. You, you been single, all of your life, so prolly you could afford it.' He paused again, as though expecting a comment, but Mernon's mouth had become dry and he did not know what to say. He said nothing.
'But I never could, alia rich guys; I could never belong to no club like that. I know that without even askm'. Hell, I never even been m one. Only golf course I ever even been to was the Veterans', anyone can get in down in Springfield. I went there once with Billy, my wife's kid brother, Billy. He always used to play a lot there, back when he was still alive. He was on total disability, the full one-hundred fuckin' percent. So he always had plenty of time. Money, too. Plenty of time and plenty of money. Guess it ought be that way, though, you got hit with something means you're gonna die that young.
He got sprayed with Agent Orange, Vietnam. So there wasn't any question it was honest; he was sick. You couldn't really begrudge him.
He was always onna lookout for company, someone to go with him when he played. He played every chance he got, every day the weather let him.
I was workin' mostly nights then, so he asked me once did I think I'd like to try it, maybe even take it up.
'I said: 'Shit, I dunno. How'd I know? I did dun know the first thing about it.' And he said: 'Well, that's how you find out. Otherwise you never know. You should come with me, some time, and find out how you like it.' Well, I didn't really wanna, but his sister, who's my wife, she was always after me, be nice to Billy. 'He is dyin' and we have to treat him nice.' So we made a date and the next time he was going he came over and he picked me up and I went with him. To the Veterans', like I said; that was where he always played.
'I didn't actually play, myself. What I did was, I just walked around with him. But I didn't think I'd like it. It seemed like it was awful complicated, before you even got so you were learnin' how to go about it. And you hadda have an awful lot of stuff there, that equipment, which I then had to figure… well, Billy, he said you could rent it if you didn't have it yourself and you weren't sure that you wanted to go out and buy it. Special shoes and everything, which I guess you have to wear. Not that I did, just had sneakers, but of course I wasn't playin'.
'I figured even that it'd have to cost a lot of money, and Christina and me, we sure didn't have much of that stuff lying around loose at that time or any other time I can recall, the kid and all. I never came right out and told him that I wasn't gonna do it. We just sort of left it hanging up in the air there, the way you'll do when you don't really want to decide about something but you sort of know you have.
'Then he died. I never did find out what happened to his clubs. They were nice. He told me that they cost four hundred dollars. I don't think I ever saw them after that, when he was dead. Maybe one his buddies must've took 'em. Had to've been that he didn't have no kids to take 'em so it wouldn't've been them. Friend of his must've come and took 'em.
'You two, though, I guess you and Hilhard there, you've belonged up Grey Hills there a pretty long time, right? So you two must've played a lot.'
'Over twenty years,' Merrion said. 'Joined there back in the Seventies. 'Way back, turn of the century, it was a big private estate. Belonged to a guy named Jesse Grey. Big mill-owner, Holyoke.
Went to hell in the Depression. Then the bishop bought it, diocese of Springfield. After the war a group of wealthy people from around here got together and bought it from him, from the diocese: Warren Corey, all his pals. They thought they were aristocrats, elite. Very snobby and selective. Had to know who your grandparents were and more'n that, had to've liked 'em; didn't count if they'd been the servants 'fore they'd let your ass in the front door. Not all that keen on Catholics, either, unless they're from 'way out of town hadda be New York, London or Paris. Or Nazareth, maybe; that might've done it.'
He hesitated but Whalen's face showed no sign of amusement. 'Anyway, hadda be famous places like that. Very picky, back in those days, about who they'd let in. But then after a while, the snobs reached the point where they were beginning to run out of money. Gave them a whole different attitude, new outlook on the Great Unwashed. They decided they needed new blood, or at least new bank accounts. So they announced that they were expanding; that was when me and Danny joined up.'
'Pretty expensive, I suppose?' Whalen said.
'Well, it certainly wasn't cheap,' Merrion said. 'Not by my standards, at least. It's been so long ago I forget what it was, but I know it sure wasn't cheap.
'We thought long and hard about it 'fore we did it, Dan and I did,'
Merrion said, feeling he was talking too much and too nervously, giving away more information than he wanted to, but hoping to create some harmless tangent that would divert Whalen from the topic of Dan Hilliard's finances. 'We talked it over quite a bit, thought about it a hell of a lot. Our feeling then was that Yeah, it was too expensive, but this might be the only opening wed ever get. And even if it wasn't, we knew wed never see a better price. Financially, no, it wasn't the best time in the world for us, either one of us, no, but the way we looked at it, we had to move. The chance probably wouldn't come along again. They got enough other new members to get them over the hump, they'd close the membership again. So we said: 'What the hell, only go around once,' and went ahead and signed up.'
'How much did it cost you, don't mind me asking,' Whalen said.
'Hell no, I don't mind,' Merrion said, minding a great deal indeed and silently cursing the man. 'I'd tell you if I knew, but that was a long time ago. It was no small amount, I can tell you that much, but exactly, I don't remember.'
'Tell me about, then,' Whalen said, 'about how much do you think it was? A thousand or two thousand bucks?'
'Oh no,' Merrion said, thinking Fuck, hoping he was still speaking calmly, 'I know it was more'n that. I remember saying to Danny back then: 'I must be nuts. I could trade in my car on a new one for this, get a brand new Olds for myself.' So it must've been two or three grand.' Whalen's eyes widened and he looked like he might be going to say something, so Merrion hurried on. 'But we went through with it anyway. One way or the other we scraped up the dough. I ended up driving the same car for about nine years, I think it was, and the cars they built
