She had died happy. When the stroke slammed her on her back, brain-dead, she'd been having considerable but very pleasant difficulty keeping her mind on trees and bushes. Having met him, she'd become convinced that her friend Nina Ealing from Longmeadow, another stylish lady on the board of trustees of the Springfield Symphony, was definitely having an affair with this young man. She had begun to suspect it when Nina blushed and became flustered, fluttering her hands as she gushed her recommendation of Hardigrew's work. And she'd become sure that he was now coming on to her, which she found charming and exciting. She had been consequently quite distracted by a fantasy in which she'd already given him the landscaping job in order to have sex with him on the green-and-white chaise lounge in the sunporch on some hot afternoon when he was sweaty and had removed his faded black tee-shirt and used it to mop his hairy chest, she having lightly and casually invited him inside with an offer of beer. She had also definitely resolved simultaneously, it seemed, and perhaps more realistically, but ruling nothing out -to ask Nina wickedly over a drink after the next board meeting whether Hardigrew's bedding skills were limited to gardening. Then her happy world and her fine girlish plans and all her laughing dreams disappeared into the last darkness.
Devastated, Heck nonetheless seemed within a year or so to have recovered his equilibrium. The following winter, 1973-74, he'd remarried quite suddenly, it'd seemed to his friends if not to his only child, then about twenty. Julian hadn't been noticeably affected by his mother's death. "Hardly seemed to notice it," Hilliard'd said to Merrion when Heck was not around. "Not that it didn't inconvenience him; I heard him tell someone that the reason he didn't play in the Berkshire member-guest was the first round was the day of her funeral.
But nothing serious."
At first the new marriage seemed happy. The second wife was young enough but not too young, and that was good, such balances being important when a new woman moves into a small and settled community as the spouse of a prominent member. Not that anyone at the club was ever really sure of her exact age; she looked to be in her late thirties, a copper-haired and very pretty divorcee he'd met skiing, up at Killington. Some thought it ominous that while her name was Alicia, Heck called her "Lisha' in their hearing, too close to his first wife's name to make them feel right about it "Lisa Two," they called her, behind her back; suggesting Heck'd seized upon her mindlessly, as a replica.
In retrospect there seemed to have been no obvious reason why it shouldn't've worked out, anything that should have alerted Heck's friends to what was going to happen so they could have been ready to help him get through it. She was certainly pleasant enough when you met her, and by the look of it she seemed to be at least fairly well-off herself, so she didn't appear to be after Heck's money. She even took up golf, right after they were married. But then before anyone had really gotten to know her, Heck the following July put it around quietly that they'd been divorced and she'd moved back to Michigan, less than a year after they'd been married. He seemed to take it pretty well without the help of friends, though: "Just one of those things, i guess," was about all he had to say about it. "I guess some things you just never know 'til you've tried 'em, and then when you find out they weren't what you thought you don't want them around anymore. That's the way it goes, some times; just the way it goes."
The consensus was that it couldn't've been Heck's fault his business remained intact.
Heck made no secret of the pride he took in what he'd done to expand the firm, building much of it on major printing contracts he'd gone after and won from the Commonwealth. A year or so after Haskell's death, Heck had come down to Holyoke one Friday night with Carl Kuiper, a major electrical contractor from Deerfield. Carl was a big beefy man with a big stomach he shelved on the waistband of his trousers. He complained that he gained weight despite considerable exercise, snow-shoeing cross-country in the winter; in the summer rowing himself the 2.5 miles from his big stone house on Hampton Pond to his favorite fishing cove. His face was deeply red, partly from rosacea, a skin condition that his doctor said was aggravated in his case by reckless exposure to direct sunlight. "But I always wear a hat," he said, disregarding sunlight reflecting from the snow and water. His doctor also said the rosacea meant he should avoid drinking alcohol. "Ahh, all I ever drink is beer," he said. "I sweat a lot when I work out and get dehyderated. I threw up and fainted once, I let that happen to me.
Not going to again."
