Those assets, together with his regular and unabashed reports of fresh misfortunes and new humiliations he had suffered on the golf course, had twice inspired Merrion to suggest that he allow Merrion to sponsor him to fill a vacancy left at Grey Hills by the death of a member (Hilhard, getting wind of Memon's first offer, said he'd blackball Fox if it came to that, and Merrion had been concerned enough to remind Hilliard how he'd gotten into Grey Hills, and tell him if he did spike Fox, "I'll get even with you'). But each time Walter after giving the invitation some thought had declined, citing the comfort-level of his second-generation old-shoe status at the Holyoke Country Club, and his 'pagan's apprehension that taking a dead man's place could be dangerous,
just asking for trouble. Might tempt the ever-present faraway fellow in the bright nightgown, you know? "Goddamnit, if Fd've wanted that slot occupied, I wouldn't've snuffed Harold now, would I?"
So Merrion had been genuinely saddened when he heard of Walter's death, and had meant it when he told Diane that he was sorry. She had patted his hand and said she knew he had been one of Walter's favorite bad companions, and expressed her opinion 'that if he only hadn't had quite so many friends like you, or enjoyed them quite so much, he might still be alive today." But she said she didn't bear Merrion any grudge: "He was a big boy, after all. He knew what he was doing."
In her reconfiguration of herself after Walter's death, Diane became convinced the house provided spiritual strength. That was definitely something new for her. Walter at her urging had acquired it, a Fox Agency exclusive listing, as their wedding present to each other. He was quite aware its splendid kitchen was not the only reason why she preferred it to the house in Hampton Pond he had inherited from Phil.
The other was the fact that that house had been tainted by his first wife's occupancy. He did not say that to Diane (he told Merrion once with some rueful nostalgia that he thought the principal reason he'd 'married Jaquie was she had these big dreamy bedroom eyes." When Merrion said that was probably as good a reason as any for a first marriage, Walter said it probably was not, 'but it was as good a one as I needed at the time. Then I found out that what I thought was sexiness was just astigmatism, very easily corrected. As soon as she got her glasses and saw what I was up to, she turned on me, got mean').
As Diane had come to see it, the two of them by having raised in the new house his daughter, Rachel, by his first marriage along with their two sons, with no more numerous losses of temper and exchanges of sharp remarks, soon regretted, than most hard-working, reasonably fortunate families manage to survive without permanent harm had in the process made a kind of emotional investment in the building, and so had acquired spiritual equity in the very lumber, lathing, plaster and cement of it.
She had needed time to steady herself after Walter's inconsiderately sudden departure (Dan Hilhard, putting aside her part in the disruption of his personal life and therefore his political career, cheered her a little at the wake by muttering that while of course he was sorry,
"Republicans're like that, you know; always afraid if they hang around too long they'll get stuck with the check; so they duck out of everything early'). To go with the time she had required as well a good deal of help and support from longtime friends.
In that gathering of wits she had found herself to her surprise depending upon Ambrose Merrion emotionally. Walter had had many more secrets than she had suspected, and Amby was the only man she knew herself who also knew the secrets. "It was insidious," she said, when she realized later what had happened to her while she was engaged in doing something else. Coming over time to believe gratefully that the history she had in the house on Pynchon Hill would be a major source of strength, as long as she stayed put, she had also gotten used to seeing Merrion around in it a lot. When she had finished remaking her life to accommodate Walter's abrupt withdrawal from it, a little over a year later, she found Merrion had worked his way into it ('wormed," she said once, to him, but he looked a little hurt so she didn't use that term again). Not into the place in her life that had been Walter's, not by any means she had closed that off- but still in it, just the same, with a new place of his own.
"Animism, I know," she said of her new attitude toward the house, preferring to keep conversations light until she had become sure enough of what she thought of Memon's new importance to want to talk about it.
"Early symptom of the onset of feeblemindedness. Or reversion to the primitive state. Next thing you know, I'll be painting myself blue and running around out in the woods with no clothes on, worshiping resonant trees, talismanic squirrels and sacred rocks. But a good house or any other place does have power to comfort, the solace of familiarity. It doesn't have to have a real soul of its own to do that, but it has to have some special something most houses don't seem to have character.
Most of them're just buildings, frames with walls and roof sections hung on them. When you get one that's more than that, you shouldn't part with it. It would be a sin against the Great Spirit."
Merrion during the same period had been getting used to being around Diane a lot. In the course of helping her to master the financial matters that Walter had covertly managed out of her sight (as he had prudently kept them from Jaquie's view as well, thus saving more than a few dollars in the divorce settlement, obeying Larry Lane's rule against confiding financial data to possibly treacherous kinfolk with no honest need to know it), he grew accustomed to spending time with her, several hours during the weekend or an evening or two during the week. He enjoyed his new habit of her company, and saw no reason to discontinue seeing her after they had rearranged her assets under her control.
By then he had long since recovered very nicely and completely from the real but transient sorrow he had felt at Walter's death. He had not become happy that Walter had died, but he admitted to himself that he would have been seriously inconvenienced if Walter, as much fun as he'd always been in life, had somehow managed to come back. Life goes on, Merrion reminded himself firmly, when he felt his first and only feathery twinge of guilt after an evening of enjoying the company of Walter's widow. Walter knew that and he left it just the same, and it went on without him. Poor judgment on his part; probably wishes now he hadn't done it. Tough shit for him.
Once a week, most often Thursdays because he seldom could be absolutely sure until late Friday afternoon that he wouldn't have to be available Friday and Saturday evenings for bail hearings, he invited Diane to join him after work for drinks and dinner, usually at the Old Post Road Tavern his established familiarity there had bred superior service and access to special dishes off the menu.
When she resumed entertaining two years after Walter's death, it was assumed Merrion would act as host. From time to time she cooked for him on winter weekend evenings. Once or twice each summer, as he was going to do on that third Sunday in August, he drove her out to Tanglewood to hear the concerts her stepdaughter had selected as her birthday gift each March, and she made dinner reservations for them afterwards at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge.
Merrion more or less assumed that she would be available for any outings, the regular Thursday dinners or movies on the spur-of-the-moment. He would have been disappointed if she had said she had another commitment, but she never did. She would have been at least irked had he pleaded a prior social engagement made it impossible for him to bring over a bottle of red wine and share a pheasant she had bought on a whim and just finished roasting, but every time she had an impulse and called to invite him to do some such thing, he was always ready to do it. "We do pretty well for each other, don't we, Amby?" she said to him very early one morning, kissing him safe-home just inside the half-opened door. "Not badly at all," he replied.