July; they wait 'til August. The sun and the Gulf Stream don't warm up the water enough to swim in until around the end of July, so all of us who go there before that either stay out of the water or freeze our balls off."
She had gotten the main house in Bell Woods estates in Hampton Pond.
"When Nick Hardigrew was still alive, he had a key to the house. I think he found out how to get into something else over there too, but who'm I to make remarks? Nobody is. Hell, one of our English teachers, queer as a green horse but funny as hell; three or four of us were talking the other day about how all of us like western movies and nobody makes them anymore, and he says he even likes westerns. And somebody said: "Really? You guys like westerns?" And he says: "Oh, yes, absolutely, faggots love westerns. Especially the Lone Ranger.
Man with a mask on; so he goes on top. And Tonto: Such a hunk. If he'd only take his shirt off. Really he is such a dream. And once you know Kemo sabe means "Snookums," I mean, how could anyone ever resist?"
Everyone's got something going."
"Anyway, Mercy didn't give a key to this new lawn guy she's got now.
Told me she hasn't known him long enough yet to be sure she can trust him. So he was over there this morning and he called her and said he thought he heard water running inside, sounded like down in the cellar.
Somebody had to go over, go in and look at it, maybe get a repairman.
Tim's in Singapore with his new bride, seems to have a little better disposition than his old one did; showing her the assembly plants he runs from his office in Stamford, twelve thousand miles away. Emily's teaching summer session down in Santa Fe."
Hilliard had not lingered conversationally over his surviving daughter's living arrangements since she and a female collegue at Smith had purchased a showpiece antique farmhouse in Worthington. Since Merrion's policy was to welcome and honor personal confidences but never seek such information, he did not know whether they remained on the speaking but distant terms Hilliard had salvaged by groveling for his daughter during the publicly colorful passage of the break-up of his marriage.
In those days, to Emily's explicit disapproval, he had been frequently described in the papers as 'debonair chairman of Ways and Means' and 'man about Hill and town." The Herald called him "Dancing Dan' in the caption of a photo of him in swim trunks, surrounded by three smiling bimbos each with 'more cleavage'n Grand Canyon," Merrion told him dolefully by phone reclining on a beach chair with the ocean in the foreground and St. Thomas in the background, during a February blizzard in New England, Fred Dillinger in his Transcript column called him 'our own sunshine-lover, Dapper Dan Hilliard playing patty-cake while we all shovel."
He seemed then to be determined the parade of young women he was photographed escorting through his life would never end, one after another lissome lady in her twenties smiling at the camera with many white teeth and displaying long shiny hair, generally blonde, their large bosoms and long legs exposed to vulgar eyes and lewd speculation by microscopic dresses and 'wide belts instead of skirts." But in time the fun did end when he resigned his seat in the House in '84, four months ahead of impending electoral disaster, to become at age fifty president at Hampton Pond Community College.
He told Merrion that Emily had congratulated him on his appointment, saying she was happy because she figured he was 'finally getting tired of acting like the biggest asshole in the world." Because Hilliard was his best friend and Emily was not, Merrion did not say what he thought: that most people who knew and liked her father had for a while sadly and reluctantly shared her opinion.
All that had been several years before Emily at age thirty-one and her partner, Karen, thirty-eight, had decided to make public their commitment to each other in a meadow setting, inviting the papers. The Pioneer Valley Record, a weekly in Cumberland, ran two pictures;
Hilliard did not appear in them because he had not attended the ceremony.
"I was not invited," he told Merrion. "I chose not to be. Emily called me up and told me what was going to happen. She said she'd invited her mother and Mercy'd gotten all bent out of shape and begged her not to go through with it. Pleaded with her to be satisfied with living openly with Karen, if that's what she was sure she wanted to do.
No one was trying to stop them, so why go public and cause the rest of us all this pain and embarrassment. Emily said Mercy should have joy, not that negative reaction, that she's found her life's companion and partner, and celebrate their union, and that just shows how insensitive we are to her real needs.
