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."
