From the outset of it back in 1962, Dan while willing to concede that his approach to the landlady had been 'a little underhanded' thinking each time he did so that it was a lucky thing for him Mercy didn't know about the deals made, actions taken and understandings acquiesced in during his average week on Beacon Hill had dismissed her objections, saying it wasn't their job to elevate Sunny's or Merrion's morals.
Mercy took a sterner view. She said they were 'deceiving' the woman who owned the house at the beach by encouraging her to think that they were renting it by themselves and the kids for the month, and that Amby and Sunny were merely friends who were guests, or related by blood to one or the other of them.
Nor was that the only thing that bothered her. Regardless of what Dan said about it, Mercy believed that good Catholics did not countenance or condone fornication, 'especially by renting the place we know he's going to be using to shack up. And that's what it is: shacking up."
She did not think she was being too strict; Merrion and Sunny had no intention to get married that she had heard about.
"If she had a ring, it'd be okay, then," Dan had said.
"Not "okay," she said, 'but I wouldn't mind so much."
"Be kind of hard for you to mind at all, wouldn't it?" he said.
"Maybe," she said, 'but since they aren't engaged, it's very easy.
Unpleasant, but easy." As she saw it he was causing her to commit a venial sin by soft-soaping her into silent collusion, making her comp licit in the cottage rental.
As he always did when she slipped up, Hilliard laughed that Friday night and said: "That's my little Emmanuel girl." And she to her helpless irritation blushed and felt embarrassed, as she always did, even though she knew that she was absolutely right and there was no reason why she should.
"Should Amby marry Sunny?" he said. "I'm not sure I'd go that far.
Rather be a lonely bachelor all the solitary days of my life 'n be a worried husband all the time, any time I left the house. Sunny still looks kinda footloose to me.
"But then again, you never know. Maybe Sunny's the way she is right now because this's how she is right now. And when she's gotten it out of her system, maybe she'll be more like us. You can't be so hasty about people, you know, cookie. Just because when we were the same age that the two of them're now, we were already married and that was the right thing for us, with me runnin' for office and all that, that doesn't necessarily mean it's always gonna be the right thing for everybody else.
"But be that as it may, I still think it's time now Amby should get started on becoming an adult, makin' a real life for himself. So I'm gonna start kicking him out of the nest, see if I can shake him up a little. I owe it to him as a friend."
In 1964, when he won his second term on Beacon Hill, Hilliard felt his political future was secure enough to warrant borrowing money for the long-term rental of good space for a district office. Merrion found space on the second floor of a three-story brick building on High Street in Holyoke, last occupied by a businesswoman named Condon. "It's awful big, but except for that it looks good. I think it could work,"
Merrion said. "The Carneses own the building. They've had trouble rentin' it lately. The third floor's vacant, too. There's a tenant on the first floor but there might as well not be Saint Vincent de Paul Society runs a second-hand store there. Old clothes and used furniture. Only open weekends. Otherwise nobody's down there, makin' noise and leavin' food around, draw the rats. It's a very nice building. Old but very solid. Well-built, you know?"
Hilliard was familiar with it. He had been there many times, he said, 'but never once willingly. Lillian Condon's dancing school. Or, to be more precise: "Miss Jocelyn's Studio of the Dance." Jocelyn was her maiden name. She called it' he made his voice falsetto '"my stage name. I went under it during my career in the theater." We all called her the Dance Lady. "Hafta go the Dance Lady tonight."
"She was kind of a pathetic case, not that I thought that when I was a kid. My father said in the Twenties she used to quit her job in Condon's Drugstore every spring, travel up to Maine and spend the summer working as a chorus girl in summer-stock in one of the resort towns up there along the coast. Bar Harbor, Boothbay; someplace like that. Did it for three or four years.
Hoping for an offer that'd get her to New York; either get a job in theater or some rich guy who'd keep her on the side. And every September, she came back to the drugstore. Finally she got discouraged. Gave up on the bright lights of Broadway and came home, convinced what God wanted her to do was spend her life with her legs together, standing behind the counter.
