George Higgins - A change of gravity

"I haven't been in there since they had the time for the governor back in Eighty-eight. Five hundred a head for cocktails and peanuts, not even cashews for Christ sake, and then the bastard's a no-show. No wonder he lost. But they've still got that hush, like a shrine."

Merrion and Hilliard had the bar at Grey Hills to themselves that evening, the honor system operating on weekday nights that attracted few members in the off-season. "Still very classy. Maybe even a bit deeper, more luxurious, like they had it reupholstered in a heavier fabric. They must have to have somebody come in every year or so to clean it, don't you think? "First of May again, Fleason. Time to call the hush-cleaning people; steam all the wickedness out, freshen up the deception area."

About half a minute earlier the receptionist, a light-skinned middle-aged black woman with a blunt haircut and a hangdog expression not quite masking undifferentiated hostility had patronizingly taken his name, nodding, 'to see Mister Pooler."

"Not actually saying, but obviously meaning," Merrion told Hilliard, '"Oh, well, then, you must be in one heavy peck ah shit there, chile, you here to see Mister Pooler."

She had responded by keying a button on her telephone desk set when the light glowed steady red, in a tone verging on insolence she said: "A Mister Merrion to see you, sir." Then she had said haughtily to Merrion: "Mister Pooler will see you shortly. If you'll just have a seat."

Merrion told Hilliard 'the attitude's about the same as ever, too, I'd have to say. Every time I've had any kind of contact with Butler, Corey no more'n two or three other times in my life; don't see much of their ilk in the lowly district court I've always kind of wondered what gives with that bunch. They've got more attitude'n the fuckin' IRS.

What is it with a law firm that looks down on people who've got problems like they're dirt? They should be glad to see us. Isn't that what they're for, for the luv va Mike? Help people with their problems if they've got 'em; help them not to get 'em if so far they've been lucky isn't that what lawyers do?" '"Do," yes," Hilliard said. "Talk about, no. The good ones're sort of like successful call girls. Truly elegant call girls never took many calls anyway, even before they moved up. They considered themselves "models" or "actresses," sometimes "flight attendants." In Europe a century ago they were "courtesans." Their looks brought them to the attention of refined gentlemen. Their skills prompted the gentlemen to display them to their friends, also gentlemen of taste and breeding. If fate was kind, one of them made a flattering offer of an exclusive arrangement. The working girls became fine ladies, far above their previous calling, so far above it they may never've done it. They live at stylish addresses, two or three of them: city; winter; summer. Their clothes are in excellent taste. They have cars and drivers, to carry them to shops and lunch. They arrange formal but intimate dinners for thirty or forty, all without batting an eye. They talk about the theater and the ballet, and what's going on in the art world. What they do for what all of this costs still goes for about the same price they charged while they were on a fee-for-service basis, now under exclusive long-term contract to the one refined gentleman, one of marriage. What they act as though they do and prefer to talk about are not that sort of thing at all. Your top law firms behave the same way."

The slope-shouldered younger man had a manila folder thick with yellow papers in his left hand. Pooler was talking as the two of them walked up the corridor toward where Merrion sat in a red leather wing chair next to a reading table with a brass lamp. He could not recall ever having seen Pooler when he had not either been talking or else waiting with poorly concealed impatience for someone else to finish saying whatever was taking so long. Then Pooler would expel "Yes," from his mouth in a whinnying sigh of relief implying: regardless of that and resume talking.

The younger man, three to five inches taller than Pooler at five-eight or so like nearly every normal adult male, Merrion thought, with what he recognized as mean pleasure was stooping slightly, inclining his shiny head so as to hear clearly what Pooler was saying. That made it look as though he was deferring to Pooler.

That was the way Pooler wished it. He deliberately inflicted that discomfort upon everyone he talked to, speaking so softly that anyone taller would have to bow slightly to hear him. He did not look up while talking with anyone, even when he was seated and his listener was standing. He believed that the person inducing another to adopt a posture of deference dominated every situation. He sought dominance at all times, regardless of the apparent absence of any subject in contention or under negotiation.

"That son of a bitch," Merrion said once to Hilliard, 'you know there has to be something wrong with a guy who makes people uncomfortable on purpose."

Merrion had first met Pooler on the evening of the first Wednesday in April of 1968 at a small gathering of western Massachusetts Democratic politicians in the private dining room upstairs in a good restaurant in Springfield. The meeting had been called hurriedly by men and women with decades of gritty experience in Democratic state and national politics left puzzled and unsure of what to do in the wake of the shock they had sustained the previous Sunday evening. President Johnson's request for TV time had not been simply to announce, as feared, a further escalation of the war in Vietnam (although he had included that, to widespread disapproval). He had thunderstruck the country by mournfully and reproachfully announcing his irrevocable decision not to seek (or to accept, either, as though there'd been more than an outside chance that someone truly out of touch might call for a convention draft) their party's nomination to be re-elected 'as your prezdun."

Incorrectly, the party elders imputed their own sad uncertainty to younger regulars like Hilliard and Merrion. They too had been startled when Lyndon Johnson publicly renounced all ambition for a second full term of his own, but Merrion had been relieved and Hilliard had been elated. He had no doubt what to do. He was so sure that he abrogated his policy of saying nothing publicly until he had first tested it aloud on himself by discussing its probable effect with Merrion — Merrion that night had been unavailable, aloft on his way home from a long weekend in New Orleans with Sunny Keller, on leave from her assignment at Lackland Air Force base in Texas. Unrestrained by Merrion's caution, Hilliard jubilantly told the first reporter seeking his reaction that evening that he was backing Bobby Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination, 'hammer and tongs."

Hilliard's commitment was not new. Only his disclosure of it was. Well before Sen. Eugene McCarthy's anti-Vietnam war campaign bucking Johnson in the February New Hampshire primary had yielded a close-second-place finish, Hilliard had said he hoped that Kennedy would challenge the president, but he had not said so for attribution in the media. Rashly doing so that night, he said that LBJ's withdrawal was 'the best news the party's had in years. If he'd wanted the nomination, he would've had it for the asking. Sitting presidents are not to be denied, McCarthy or not. Anyone who thinks otherwise is dreaming. But then he would've lost. Guarantee you, matched-up against Lyndon, Nixon wins."

"I think that maybe did not play too good," Merrion told him grimly in the immediate aftermath of the announcement. Hilliard demurred, but after two days of fielding strong reactions, he reluctantly accepted Merrion's assessment: "You've made a lot of people goddamned mad at you, all at once, without doing yourself any damned good at all. No other mistake we've ever made, and we have made some beauts, did so much damage so fast. You've pissed-off people we don't even know. They didn't know each other, until you lit them off; you're the first thing they've ever had in common.